The effect of initial nuclear deformation on dielectron photoproduction in hadronic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This study investigates how the initial nuclear deformation of uranium nuclei affects electron-positron pair production via photon-photon interactions in heavy-ion collisions, using theoretical calculations and event analysis.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculations of $e^+e^-$ photoproduction in deformed U + U collisions, highlighting the impact of nuclear shape on pair yields.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental data for certain centrality classes.

Differences between spherical and deformed nuclei are about 3%.

Yield ratios in Ru + Ru and Zr + Zr collisions show less than 1% variation.

Abstract

Significant excesses of $e^+e^-$ pair production at very low transverse momentum ($p_T <$ 0.15 GeV/c) were observed by the STAR collaboration in hadronic heavy-ion collisions. Such enhancement is assumed to be a sign of photon-photon production in heavy-ion collisions with hadronic overlap, based on comparisons with model calculations for spherical Au + Au collisions. However, there is a lack of calculations for $e^+e^-$ pair production from coherent photon-photon interactions in hadronic U + U collisions, due to the deformity of Uranium nuclei. In this article, we present calculations for $e^+e^-$ pair photoproduction at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 193 GeV in both spherical and deformed U + U collisions within STAR detector acceptance using the equivalent photon approximation (EPA). We conduct event-by-event analysis to investigate the effects of initial nuclear deformation on pair production. Our numerical results show good agreement with experimental data for the 40%--60% and 60%--80% centrality classes in U + U collisions, and the differences between spherical and deformed configurations are approximately 3\%. We also calculate the yields of the photoproduced $e^+e^-$ pair in hadronic deformed Ru + Ru and Zr + Zr collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV. The results reveal that the ratios of the yields of Ru to Zr exhibit very small differences ($<$ 1%) between spherical and deformed cases.