No Arabic abstract
A significant fraction of pp collisions at the LHC will involve (quasi-real) photon interactions occurring at energies well beyond the electroweak energy scale. Hence, the LHC can to some extend be considered as a high-energy photon-photon or photon-proton collider. This offers a unique possibility for novel and complementary research where the available effective luminosity is small, relative to parton-parton interactions, but it is compensated by better known initial conditions and usually simpler final states. This is in a way a method for approaching some of the issues to be addressed by the future lepton collider. Such studies of photon interactions are possible at the LHC, thanks to the striking experimental signatures of events involving photon exchanges, in particular the presence of very forward scattered protons.
Experimental prospects for studying high-energy photon-photon and photon-proton interactions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are discussed. Cross sections are calculated for many electroweak and beyond the Standard Model processes. Selection strategies based on photon interaction tagging techniques are studied. Assuming a typical LHC multipurpose detector, various signals and their irreducible backgrounds are presented after applying acceptance cuts. Prospects are discussed for the Higgs boson search, detection of supersymmetric particles and of anomalous quartic gauge couplings, as well as for the top quark physics.
In this paper we investigate the $eta_c$ production by photon - photon and photon - hadron interactions in $pp$ and $pA$ collisions at the LHC energies. The inclusive and diffractive contributions for the $eta_c$ photoproduction are estimated using the nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics (NRQCD) formalism. We estimate the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions for the $eta_c$ photoproduction in hadronic collisions at the LHC and present our estimate for the total cross sections at the Run 2 energies. A comparison with the predictions for the exclusive $eta_c$ photoproduction, which is a direct probe of the Odderon, also is presented.
The exclusive two-photon production at the LHC of pairs of W and Z bosons provides a novel and unique test-ground for the electroweak gauge boson sector. In particular it offers, thanks to high gamma-gamma center-of-mass energies, large and direct sensitivity to the anomalous quartic gauge couplings otherwise very difficult to investigate at the LHC. An initial analysis has been performed assuming leptonic decays and generic acceptance cuts. Simulation of a simple counting experiment has shown for the integrated luminosity of 10 fb-1 at least four thousand times larger sensitivity to the genuine quartic couplings, a_0^W, a_0^Z, a_C^W and a_C^Z, than those obtained at LEP. The impact of the unitarity constraints on the estimated limits has been studied using the dipole form-factors. Finally, differential distributions of the decay leptons have been provided to illustrate the potential for further improvements of the sensitivities.
Various pion and photon production mechanisms in high-energy nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC are discussed. Comparison with RHIC data is done whenever possible. The prospect of using electromagnetic probes to characterize quark-gluon plasma formation is assessed.
Photon interactions at the LHC result in striking final states with much lower hadronic activity in the central detectors than for pp interactions. In addition, the elastic exchange of a photon leads to a proton scattered at almost zero-degree angle. Tagging photon interactions relies on either the use of large rapidity gaps or on the detection of the scattered proton using very forward detectors. The studies related to such detectors are presented, including their characterization, their acceptance and reconstruction performance. Limitations due to the LHC beamline misalignment and possible solutions are also given.