High Energy Two-Photon Interactions at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the detection and study of high-energy two-photon interactions at the LHC, emphasizing the importance of proton tagging and the potential for new physics insights at high luminosity.

Contribution

It presents methods for tagging two-photon events at the LHC and explores promising research topics in high-energy photon-photon physics.

Findings

Proton tagging enables efficient selection of two-photon events.

High-energy two-photon interactions can be studied at 1% of pp collision luminosity.

The approach opens new avenues for photon-photon physics research at the LHC.

Abstract

Two-photon events at the LHC are characterized by the protons scattered at very small angles and the particles centrally produced via the photon-photon fusion. To select these events from the huge samples of generic pp interactions a detection of the scattered protons, or tagging two-photon interactions is necessary. It requires installation of the high-resolution position-sensitive detectors close to the proton beam and far from the interaction point. Efficient measurement of the forward-scattered protons will open a new field of studying high-energy photon-photon interactions at remarkable luminosity, reaching 1% of that in pp collisions. In this paper a few aspects of tagging two-photon interactions as well as several most exciting topics in the high-energy two-photon physics at the LHC are presented.