Exclusive production of lepton, quark and meson pairs in peripheral ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the exclusive production of lepton, quark, and meson pairs in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions using the Equivalent Photon Approximation, highlighting the impact of realistic charge form factors on cross section calculations.

Contribution

It introduces the use of realistic nuclear charge form factors in calculating pair production cross sections, comparing results with traditional monopole models.

Findings

Realistic form factors reduce cross section estimates significantly.

Absorption effects are quantified and discussed.

Cross sections vary notably between different form factor models.

Abstract

We discuss exclusive production of lepton-antilepton, quark-antiquark, $\pi \pi$ and $\rho^0 \rho^0$ pairs in ultraperipheral, ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The cross sections for exclusive production of pairs of particles is calculated in Equivalent Photon Approximation (EPA). Realistic (Fourier transform of charge density) charge form factors of nuclei are used and the corresponding results are compared with the cross sections calculated with monopole form factor used in the literature. Absorption effects are discussed and quantified. The cross sections obtained with realistic form factors are significantly smaller than those obtained with the monopole form factors.