True Leptonium ($l^+ l^-$) Production in UPC Triphoton Interaction

TL;DR

This paper predicts the production of true leptonium states, including dimuonium and tauonium, in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions via triphoton interactions, offering new detection opportunities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for generating and detecting true leptonium states in UPCs, with implications for experimental searches at the LHC.

Findings

Significant ortho-leptonium production via triphoton interactions in UPCs.

The mechanism can explain existing J/ψ and dimuon production data at LHC.

Provides a new pathway to observe elusive leptonium states.

Abstract

True leptonium states ($l^+ l^-$) are compact pure QED systems, first theoretically predicted eight decades ago. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to their search, only positronium has been experimentally confirmed shortly after its theoretical prediction. By contrast, dimuonium ($\mu^+ \mu^-$) and tauonium ($\tau^+ \tau^-$) remain unobserved to date, partly due to their low production yields. In this work, we find that a significant number of ortho-leptonium states can be generated through the triphoton interaction process in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions (UPCs). In this process, two photons are emitted from one beam, while the third photon originates from the other beam. This unique interaction mechanism thus provides a distinctive opportunity to pinpoint dimuonium and tauonium. Moreover, within the three-body interaction mechanism, we find that the experimental data for $J/\psi$ production and dimuon production in ultraperipheral Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be well reproduced.