Searching for True Muonium in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to detect true muonium, a bound state of muon and anti-muon, in relativistic heavy-ion collisions by modeling its production within the quark-gluon plasma using transport and hydrodynamic simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theoretical framework combining Boltzmann transport and hydrodynamics to estimate true muonium production in heavy-ion collisions, providing the first quantitative predictions for its yields.

Findings

Effective cross sections are 1.23 μb for AuAu at 200 GeV.

Effective cross sections are 14.2 μb for PbPb at 5.02 TeV.

Predicted yields are on the order of 10^4 to 10^5 true muonium per billion collisions.

Abstract

We investigate the production of the as-yet-undetected true muonium within the quark-gluon plasma formed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, employing a relativistic Boltzmann transport framework coupled to viscous hydrodynamic simulations. The obtained effective cross sections for central collisions are 1.23~$\mu b$ in AuAu collisions with $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=200$~GeV and 14.2~$\mu b$ in PbPb collisions with $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$~TeV, resulting in a yield of $\mathcal{O}(10^4)$ and $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ true muonium per billion $AA$ collisions at RHIC and the LHC, respectively. This establishes heavy-ion collisions as a promising process for detecting true muonium.