Physics of Ultra-Peripheral Nuclear Collisions

Ultraperipheral collisions at heavy ion colliders use the strong Coulomb fields surrounding the ions to study photon-photon and photon-hadron processes at high energy. A number of processes of interest are discussed here.

Coherent peripheral collisions of atomic nuclei involve electromagnetic or long range hadronic interactions at impact parameters, where both nuclei survive intact. Recently such ultra-peripheral collisions were observed at RHIC. The effect of the electromagnetic field can be interpreted as a photon-photon collision with an effective center of mass energy up to a few GeV at RHIC. At the Large Hadron Collider the effective center of mass energy will be increased by more than an...

Heavy ions at high velocities provide very strong electromagnetic fields for a very short time. The main characteristics of ultraperipheral relativistic heavy ion collisions are reviewed, characteristic parameters are identified. The main interest in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions at relativistic ion colliders like the LHC is the interactions of very high energy (equivalent) photons with the countermoving (equivalent) photons and hadrons (protons/ions). The physics of t...

In central collisions at relativistic heavy ion colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC/Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider LHC (in its heavy ion mode) at CERN/Geneva, one aims at detecting a new form of hadronic matter - the Quark Gluon Plasma. It is the purpose of this review to discuss a complementary aspect of these collisions, the very peripheral ones. Due to coherence, there are strong electromagnetic fields of short duration in such collisions. The...

This article presents a very brief review of the physics of Ultra-Peripheral Collisions (UPC) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other nuclear facilities. I discuss several processes of interest such as electron-position pair production, the anti-hydrogen atom, giant resonances, exotic meson production and parton distribution functions.

In central collisions at relativistic heavy ion colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC/Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider LHC (in its heavy ion mode) at CERN/Geneva, one aims at detecting a new form of hadronic matter --- the Quark Gluon Plasma. We discuss here a complementary aspect of these collisions, the very peripheral ones. Due to coherence, there are strong electromagnetic fields of short duration in such collisions. They give rise to photon-phot...

In central collisions at relativistic heavy ion colliders like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC/Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider LHC (in its heavy ion mode) at CERN/Geneva, one aims at detecting a new form of hadronic matter - the Quark Gluon Plasma. We discuss here a complementary aspect of these collisions, the very peripheral ones. Due to coherence, there are strong electromagnetic fields of short duration in such collisions. They give rise to photon-photon...

Large-distance ultraperipheral collisions of two relativistic ions are considered. The clouds of photons surrounding the ions are responsible for their distant electromagnetic interaction. The perturbative approach and the method of equivalent photons are described. It is shown that the total cross section of these collisions increases rapidly with increasing energy and is especially large for heavy ions. Some experimental data and their comparison with theoretical approaches...

The strong electromagnetic fields carried by relativistic highly charged ions make heavy-ion colliders attractive places to study photonuclear interactions and two-photon interactions. At RHIC, three experiments have studied coherent photoproduction of $\rho^0$, 4$\pi$, $J/\psi$, $e^+e^-$ pairs, and $e^+e^-$ pairs where the electron is bound to one of the incident nuclei. These results show that photoproduction studies are possible, and demonstrate some of the unique possib...

Ultra-peripheral collisions are the energy frontier for photon-mediated interactions, reaching, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), $\gamma-p$ center of mass energies five to ten times higher than at HERA and reaching $\gamma\gamma$ energies higher than at LEP. Photoproduction of heavy quarkonium and dijets in $pp$ and $pA$ collisions probes the gluon distribution in protons at Bjorken-$x$ values down to $3\times10^{-6}$, far smaller than can be otherwise studied. In $AA$ col...