Production of exotic atoms at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production mechanisms and distributions of exotic atoms like muonic and pionic atoms at CERN's LHC, providing detailed theoretical insights and predictions for their spatial, temporal, and angular characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a multipole expansion approach to analyze the bound-free production mechanism of exotic atoms, which is a novel theoretical development.

Findings

Multipole expansion offers new insights into electromagnetic interactions.

Predictions include spatial, temporal, and angular distributions of exotic atoms.

Total cross sections for exotic atom production are provided.

Abstract

We study in details the space-time dependence of the production of muonic, pionic, and other exotic atoms by the coherent photon exchange between nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. We show that a multipole expansion of the electromagnetic interaction yields an useful insight of the bound-free production mechanism which has not been explored in the literature. Predictions for the spatial, temporal, and angular distribution, as well as the total cross sections, for the production of exotic atoms are also included.