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.
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