STARlight: A Monte Carlo simulation program for ultra-peripheral collisions of relativistic ions
Spencer R. Klein🇺🇸 · Joakim Nystrand🇳🇴 · Janet Seger🇺🇸 · Yuri Gorbunov🇺🇸 · Joey Butterworth🇺🇸
Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) have been a significant source of study at RHIC and the LHC. In these collisions, the two colliding nuclei interact electromagnetically, via two-photon or photonuclear interactions, but not hadronically; they effectively miss each other. Photonuclear interactions produce vector meson states or more general photonuclear final states, while two-photon interactions can produce lepton or meson pairs, or single mesons. In these interactions, the collision geometry plays a major role. We present a program, STARlight, that calculates the cross-sections for a variety of UPC final states and also creates, via Monte Carlo simulation, events for use in determining detector efficiency.