Two- and three-photon fusion in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

✍ Scribed by C.A. Bertulani; F.S. Navarra

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 153 KB
• Volume: 703
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0375-9474
• DOI: 10.1016/s0375-9474(01)01666-9

✦ Synopsis

The production of mesons in ultraperipheral collisions of relativistic heavy ions is reanalyzed using a projection technique to calculate the amplitudes for the appropriate Feynman diagrams. The virtuality of the exchanged photons is fully accounted for in this approach. In the case of two-photon fusion, it is explicitly shown that the inclusion of nuclear form factors validates the equivalent photon approximation. However, this does not apply to three-photon fusion cross sections. The cross section of J/ψ production in ultraperipheral collisions at RHIC and LHC are shown to be much smaller than the cross sections for the production of C-even mesons of similar masses.