Azimuthal asymmetries of muon pair production in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates azimuthal asymmetries in muon pair production during ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions, incorporating all-order QED radiation effects and muon mass corrections, with numerical estimates relevant to RHIC and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework combining impact parameter and transverse momentum dependence, including all-order QED resummation and muon mass effects, for analyzing azimuthal asymmetries.

Findings

Muon mass effects significantly influence asymmetries at high transverse momentum.

Resummation of QED radiation provides accurate predictions across kinematic regions.

Asymmetries vary notably between RHIC and LHC energies.

Abstract

In this paper we study azimuthal asymmetries of the muon pair production in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions within the joint impact parameter and transverse momentum dependent framework. The final state QED radiation effects are resummed to all orders in perturbation theory, where the complete muon mass corrections are also taken into account. We further make numerical estimations for azimuthal asymmetries in the different kinematic regions accessible at RHIC and LHC with the derived resummation formula. We find that the lepton mass effects can give sizable corrections to the asymmetries at relatively large pair transverse momentum at RHIC energy.