First measurement of the -dependence of incoherent J/ photonuclear production
ALICE Collaboration
The first measurement of the cross section for incoherent photonuclear production of J/ vector mesons as a function of the Mandelstam variable is presented. The measurement was carried out with the ALICE detector at midrapidity, , using ultra-peripheral collisions of Pb nuclei at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of TeV. This rapidity interval corresponds to a Bjorken- range . Cross sections are given in five intervals in the range GeV and compared to the predictions by different models. Models that ignore quantum fluctuations of the gluon density in the colliding hadron predict a -dependence of the cross section much steeper than in data. The inclusion of such fluctuations in the same models provides a better description of the data.