As an Introduction: Quest for New Physics in Photon-Photon Interactions at the LHC

TL;DR

The paper discusses how the LHC can serve as a high-energy photon-photon or photon-proton collider, enabling novel physics research through photon interactions with distinctive experimental signatures.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of the LHC to explore photon interactions as a complementary approach to future lepton colliders, emphasizing unique experimental signatures.

Findings

Photon interactions at the LHC can be studied via forward scattered protons.

Photon interactions provide cleaner initial conditions compared to parton-parton collisions.

LHC acts as a high-energy photon collider for new physics searches.

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.