Investigating the exclusive protoproduction of dileptons at high energies

TL;DR

This paper studies the exclusive production of dileptons at high energies using the color dipole approach, providing insights into electromagnetic interactions in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions relevant to LHC experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a simple dipole-hadron scattering model to analyze dilepton photoproduction, complementing traditional partonic descriptions with a focus on high-energy regimes.

Findings

Model captures dependence on atomic number, energy, and momentum transfer.

Provides predictions for dilepton production in pp and AA collisions at LHC.

Enhances understanding of electromagnetic processes in high-energy collisions.

Abstract

Using the high energy color dipole approach, we study the exclusive photoproduction of lepton pairs. We use simple models for the elementary dipole-hadron scattering amplitude that captures main features of the dependence on atomic number A, on energy and on momentum transfer t. This investigation is complementary to conventional partonic description of timelike Compton scattering, which considers quark handbag diagrams at leading order in $\alpha_s$ and simple models of the relevant generalized parton distributions (GPDs). These calculations are input in electromagnetic interactions in pp and AA collisions to measured at the LHC.