Production of exotic atoms at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production mechanisms and distributions of exotic atoms like muonic and pionic atoms at CERN's LHC, providing new insights through multipole expansion analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multipole expansion approach to analyze the bound-free production mechanism of exotic atoms at high energies.

Findings

Multipole expansion offers new insights into electromagnetic interactions.

Predictions for spatial, temporal, and angular distributions are provided.

Total cross sections for exotic atom production are calculated.

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 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.