Peripheral Collisions of Relativistic Heavy Ions

Abstract

The physics of peripheral collisions with relativistic heavy ions (PCRHI) is reviewed. One-and two-photon processes are discussed.

Diffractive Higgs boson photoproduction inγpprocess

“…The main interest of this work is the Higgs boson production in a subprocess of Peripheral Collision [3,4], where a photon from one of the protons (ions) under collision can interact with the second one, which is shown in Fig. 4.…”

“…For the Higgs photoproduction, the virtuality of the photon exchanged in the peripheral proton-proton collision needs to be estimated. The source of photons in this kind of process is the Coulomb field around the protons under collision, and the photon spectrum is calculated by the Equivalent Photon Method (EPA), obtaining the Weizsäcker-Williams distribution [2,3]. The photons are soft particles that have low virtuality with an upper limit determined by the hadron radius…”

“…A new way to produce the Higgs boson in Peripheral Collisions at Hadron Colliders is calculated assuming an interaction through Double Pomeron Exchange (DPE) [1]. In pp collisions, the interaction will occur between the colliding proton and the photon emitted from the electromagnetic field around the second proton [2,3,4]. Thus, the only way for an interaction to occur by DPE in a photon-proton process is to consider the photon splitting into a quark-antiquark pair, which enables one to use the impact factor formalism [5].…”

“…with A L and A R being the amplitudes on the left-and right-hand side of the cut, respectively, and d(P S) 3 is the volume element of the three-body phase space. The scattering amplitude of the process is treated essentially as an imaginary quantity in view of the vacuum quantum numbers of the exchanged particle [11].…”