Simultaneous Production of Lepton Pairs at Ultra-peripheral Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper calculates the probabilities of simultaneous electron, muon, and tauon pair production in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions at LHC energies, highlighting increased likelihood compared to RHIC and potential insights into strong QED effects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of simultaneous lepton pair production including realistic nuclear form factors at LHC energies.

Findings

Probabilities of all lepton pairs increase significantly at LHC.

Realistic nuclear form factors are crucial for accurate cross section calculations.

Simultaneous production observations can inform about strong QED phenomena.

Abstract

We calculate the total cross sections and probabilities of electromagnetic productions of electron, muon and tauon pair productions simultaneously. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the available electromagnetic energy is sufficient to produce all kind of leptons coherently. The masses of muon and tauon are large, so their Compton wavelengths are small enough to interact with the colliding nuclei. Therefore, the realistic nuclear form factors are included in the calculations of electromagnetic pair productions. The cross section calculations show that, at the LHC energies, the probabilities of simultaneous productions of all kind of leptons are increased significantly compare to the RHIC energies. Experimentally, observing this simultaneous production can give us important informations about the strong QED.