Lepton pair production through two photon process in heavy ion collisions

2020/03/31 by S. R. Klein, Spencer Klein, A.H. Mueller +3 · 70 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Electron #Gluon #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Large Hadron Collider #Lepton #Momentum (technical analysis) #Nuclear physics #Pair production #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Photon #Physics #Quantum chromodynamics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Quark–gluon plasma #Resummation #Transverse plane #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.102.094013

published in Physical review. D/Physical review. D. 102(9) (American Physical Society) · 21 pages, 13 figures; added more discussions on the generalized equivalent photon approximation and 3 new figures

arxiv created 2020/06/25 · openalex publication_date 2020/11/13 · arxiv updated 2020/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

This paper investigates the electromagnetic production of lepton pairs with low total transverse momentum in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We estimate the initial photons' transverse momentum contributions by employing models where the average transverse momentum squared of the incoming photon can be calculated in the equivalent photon approximation. We further derive an all order QED resummation for the soft photon radiation, which gives an excellent description of the ATLAS data in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC. For peripheral and central collisions, additional p_T-broadening effects from multiple interactions with the medium and the magnetic field contributions from the quark-gluon plasma are also discussed.

Citations

• Electron–positron pair production in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions
• Parton distribution and decay functions
• Radiative energy loss of high energy quarks and gluons in a finite volume quark-gluon plasma
• Quark production, Bose–Einstein condensates and thermalization of the quark–gluon plasma
• Fully quantum treatment of the Landau-Pomeranchik-Migdal effect in QED and QCD
• The role of finite-size effects on the spectrum of equivalent photons in proton–proton collisions at the LHC
• Radiative energy loss of high-energy quarks in finite-size nuclear matter and quark-gluon plasma
• PHYSICS OF ULTRA-PERIPHERAL NUCLEAR COLLISIONS
• Two-photon production of dilepton pairs in peripheral heavy ion collisions
• Classical Electrodynamics