Nuclear shadowing from exclusive quarkonium photoproduction at the BNL RHIC and CERN LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how exclusive quarkonium photoproduction in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions can be used to study nuclear gluon shadowing effects, comparing theoretical predictions with experimental data from RHIC and LHC.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of nuclear shadowing effects on vector meson production using various gluon distribution models and compares results with recent experimental data.

Findings

Nuclear shadowing significantly affects quarkonium production rates.

Different gluon distribution parameterizations lead to varying predictions.

Comparison with PHENIX data constrains nuclear gluon distributions.

Abstract

The photonuclear production of vector mesons in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions is investigated within the collinear approach using different parameterizations for the nuclear gluon distribution. The integrated cross section and the rapidity distribution for the $AA \to V AA$ ($V = J/\Psi, \Upsilon$) process are computed for energies of RHIC and LHC. A comparison with the recent PHENIX data on coherent production of $J/\Psi$ mesons is also presented. We demonstrate that the study of the exclusive quarkonium photoproduction can be used to constrain the nuclear effects in the gluon distribution.