Physics of Ultra-Peripheral Nuclear Collisions

The strong electromagnetic fields in peripheral heavy ion collisions give rise to photon-photon and photon-nucleus interactions. I present a general survey of the photon-photon and photon-hadron physics accessible in these collisions. Among these processes I discuss the nuclear fragmentation through the excitation of giant resonances, the Coulomb dissociation method for application in nuclear astrophysics, and the production of particles.

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ions carry strong electromagnetic and nuclear fields. Interactions between these fields in peripheral nucleus-nucleus collisions can probe many interesting physics topics. This presentation will focus on coherent two-photon and photonuclear processes at RHIC. The rates for these interactions will be high. The coherent coupling of all the protons in the nucleus enhances the equivalent photon flux by a factor Z^2 up to an energy of ~3 GeV. The plans for...

The very strong electromagnetic fields present in ultraperipheral relativistic heavy ion collisions lead to important higher order effects of the electromagnetic interaction. These multiphoton exchange processes are studied using perturbation theory and the sudden or Glauber approximation. In many important cases, the multi-photon amplitudes factorize into independent single-photon amplitudes. These amplitudes have a common impact parameter vector, which induces correlations ...

The strong electromagnetic fields of heavy nuclei can produce a wide variety of two-photon and photonuclear reactions at relativistic ion colliders. We present recent results from the STAR collaboration on these `ultra-peripheral' interactions, focusing on vector meson production and interferometry, and on $e^+e^-$ pair production. The vector meson interferometry occurs because of the symmetric initial state: nucleus 1 can emit a photon which scatters from nucleus 2, emerging...

Due to the coherence of all the protons in a nucleus, there are very strong electromagnetic fields of short duration in relativistic heavy ion collisions. They give rise to quasireal photon-photon and photon-nucleus collisions with a large flux. RHIC will begin its experimental program this year and such types of collisions will be studied experimentally at the STAR detector. RHIC will have the highest flux of (quasireal) photons up to now in the GeV region. At the LHC the in...

We present the mini-proceedings of the workshop on ``Photoproduction at collider energies: from RHIC and HERA to the LHC'' held at the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*, Trento) from January 15 to 19, 2007. The workshop gathered both theorists and experimentalists to discuss the current status of investigations of high-energy photon-induced processes at different colliders (HERA, RHIC, and Tevatron) as well as preparations for ...

The CERN LHC is not only the current energy-frontier collider for parton-parton collisions, but has proven a powerful photon collider providing photon-photon ($\gamma\gamma$) collisions at center-of-mass energies and luminosities never reached before. The latest theoretical developments implemented in the gamma-UPC Monte Carlo (MC) event generator, which can calculate arbitrary exclusive final state produced via $\gamma\gamma$ fusion in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of pr...

We present an updated theoretical treatment of ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of heavy ions, within the SuperChic Monte Carlo generator. This in particular accounts for mutual ion excitation through additional photon exchanges between the colliding ions. This effect occurs frequently in UPCs, and indeed can be (and has been) measured in data through the use of zero degree calorimeter (ZDC) detectors installed in the far forward region. The theoretical approach presented he...

Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPC) of heavy-ions involve long range electromagnetic interactions at impact parameters twice larger than the nuclear radius, where no nucleon-nucleon collisions occur. The first measurement of photoproduction of $J/\psi$ and of two-photon production of high-mass $e^+ e^-$ pairs in ultra-peripheral nucleus-nucleus interactions will be presented, using Au+Au data at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV. The measured cross sections at midrapidity are consis...

We discuss diphoton semi(exclusive) production in ultraperipheral lead-lead collisions at energy of $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.5 TeV (LHC) and in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s_{pp}}$ = 7 TeV (LHC) and $\sqrt{s_{pp}}$ = 100 TeV (FCC). The nuclear calculations are based on equivalent photon approximation in the impact parameter space. The cross sections for elementary $\gamma\gamma \to \gamma\gamma$ subprocess are calculated including three different mechanisms: box diagrams wi...