Azimuthal angular correlations in lepton pair production in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates azimuthal asymmetries in lepton pair production during ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions, demonstrating their potential to probe photon polarization and test resummation theories at RHIC and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a refined analysis including soft photon radiation effects, confirming the feasibility of studying sub-leading resummation effects in UPCs.

Findings

Azimuthal asymmetries confirm photon polarization in UPCs.

High transverse momentum asymmetries test resummation formalism.

Results demonstrate experimental access to sub-leading effects.

Abstract

The coherent photons induced by relativistic heavy ions are highly linearly polarized, in close analogy to the linear polarization of gluons in a large nucleus. We proposed to measure the photon polarization through azimuthal asymmetries in dilepton production in ultra-peripheral collisions. Our prediction for the asymmetries were soon confirmed by the STAR experiment with high precision. We refined our analysis recently by including the final state soft photon radiation effect beyond the double leading logarithm approximation. The azimuthal asymmetries and acoplanarity at relatively high transverse momentum provide unique opportunities to test the resummation formalism thanks to the extremely high photon flux in UPCs. Our results clearly show the feasibility to access the sub-leading resummation effects in UPCs at the RHIC and LHC.