No Arabic abstract
Large-distance ultraperipheral collisions of two relativistic ions are considered. The clouds of photons surrounding the ions are responsible for their distant electromagnetic interaction. The perturbative approach and the method of equivalent photons are described. It is shown that the total cross section of these collisions increases rapidly with increasing energy and is especially large for heavy ions. Some experimental data and their comparison with theoretical approaches are described. Further proposals are discussed.
It is argued that the cross sections of ultraperipheral interactions of heavy nuclei can become comparable in value to those of their ordinary hadronic interactions at high energies. Simple estimates of corresponding preasymptotic energy thresholds are provided.The~method of equivalent photons is compared with the perturbative approach. The~situation at NICA/FAIR energies is discussed.
Using the Gribov-Glauber model for photon-nucleus scattering and a generalization of the vector meson dominance model for the hadronic structure of the photon, we make predictions for the cross section of incoherent $rho$ photoproduction in Pb-Pb ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) in the Large Hadron Collider kinematics. We find that the effect of the inelastic nuclear shadowing is significant and leads to an additional 25% suppression of the incoherent cross section. Comparing our predictions to those of the STARlight Monte Carlo framework, we observe very significant differences.
We argue that with an increase of the collision energy, elastic photoproduction of $rho$ mesons on nuclei becomes affected by the significant cross section of photon inelastic diffraction into large masses, which results in the sizable inelastic nuclear shadowing correction to $sigma_{gamma A to rho A}$ and the reduced effective $rho$-nucleon cross section. We take these effects into account by combining the vector meson dominance model, which we upgrade to include the contribution of high-mass fluctuations of the photon according to QCD constraints, and the Gribov-Glauber approximation for nuclear shadowing, where the inelastic nuclear shadowing is included by means of cross section fluctuations. The resulting approach allows us to successfully describe the data on elastic $rho$ photoproduction on nuclei in heavy ion UPCs in the $7 {rm GeV} < W_{gamma p} < 46$ GeV energy range and to predict the value of the cross section of coherent $rho$ photoproduction in Pb-Pb UPCs at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV in Run 2 at the LHC, $dsigma_{Pb Pb to rho Pb Pb} (y=0)/dy= 560 pm 25$ mb.
We calculate the cross section of inclusive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of heavy ions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD and demonstrate that it provides a good description of the ATLAS data. We study the role of this data in constraining nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) using the Bayesian reweighting technique and find that it can reduce current uncertainties of nPDFs at small $x$ by a factor of 2. We also make predictions for diffractive dijet photoproduction in UPCs and examine its potential to shed light on the disputed mechanism of QCD factorization breaking in diffraction.
It is advocated that geometry of the interaction region of two heavy nuclei colliding at large impact parameters is important for the relative role of light-by-light scattering and QCD-initiated processes. Exclusive production of resonances is possible by dense electromagnetic fields in the interior space between the nuclei. The cross section of these processes is evaluated and some examples are considered. It is speculated that the exclusive production of $rho ^0$-mesons by two-photon processes forbidden by the Landau-Yang rule may become allowed within strong magnetic fields.