Production of soft $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ Pairs in Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC by Semi-coherent Two Photon Processes

Abstract

We calculate the contribution of the two photon production process into $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ spectra, and compare the results with experimental data from the PHENIX detector at RHIC. We study the contribution given by ``semi-coherent" kinematics, in which one photon is relatively hard and is incoherently emitted by participating protons, while another can be soft enough to be in a coherent domain.