Lepton pair photoproduction in peripheral relativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates lepton pair photoproduction in peripheral heavy-ion collisions, providing detailed distributions and effects, serving as a baseline for future higher-order and medium effect studies.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive numerical analysis of lepton pair production, including photon polarization and transverse momentum effects, in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Broadening of transverse momentum distributions observed.

Significant enhancement in cos(2φ) distribution for muon pairs.

Provides baseline results for future higher-order correction studies.

Abstract

We study the lepton pair photoproduction in peripheral heavy-ion collisions based on the formalism in our previous work [Phys. Rev. D 104, 056011 (2021)]. We present the numerical results for the distributions of the transverse momentum, azimuthal angle and invariant mass for $e^{+}e^{-}$ and $\mu^{+}\mu^{-}$ pairs as functions of the impact parameter and other kinematic variables in Au+Au collisions. Our calculation incorporates the information on the transverse momentum and polarization of photons which is essential to describe the experimental data. We observe a broadening effect in the transverse momentum for lepton pairs with and without smear effects. We also observe a significant enhancement in the distribution of $\cos(2\varphi)$ for $\mu^{+}\mu^{-}$ pairs. Our results provide a baseline for future studies of other higher order corrections beyond Born approximation and medium effects in the lepton pair production.