STARlight: A Monte Carlo simulation program for ultra-peripheral collisions of relativistic ions

2016/07/31 by Spencer R. Klein, Joakim Nystrand, Janet Seger +2 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #nucl-ex

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2016.10.016

published as Comput.Phys.Commun. 212 (2017) 258-268 · 15 pages; final version with a few minor bugs corrected

arxiv created 2016/12/20 · arxiv updated 2017/04/18

Abstract

Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) have been a significant source of study at RHIC and the LHC. In these collisions, the two colliding nuclei interact electromagnetically, via two-photon or photonuclear interactions, but not hadronically; they effectively miss each other. Photonuclear interactions produce vector meson states or more general photonuclear final states, while two-photon interactions can produce lepton or meson pairs, or single mesons. In these interactions, the collision geometry plays a major role. We present a program, STARlight, that calculates the cross-sections for a variety of UPC final states and also creates, via Monte Carlo simulation, events for use in determining detector efficiency.

Cited by

• Automated next-to-leading order QCD and electroweak predictions of photon-photon processes in ultraperipheral collisions
• Measurement of coincident photon-initiated processes in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions with the ATLAS detector
• Observation of coherent φ(1020) meson photoproduction in ultraperipheral PbPb collisions at √(s_NN) = 5.36 TeV