Lepton pair photoproduction in peripheral relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We study the lepton pair photoproduction in peripheral heavy-ion collisions based on the formalism in our previous work [Phys. Rev. D 104, 056011 (2021)]. We present the numerical results for the distributions of the transverse momentum, azimuthal angle and invariant mass for $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ and ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ pairs as functions of the impact parameter and other kinematic variables in Au+Au collisions. Our calculation incorporates the information on the transverse momentum and polarization of photons which is essential to describe the experimental data. We observe a broadening effect in the transverse momentum for lepton pairs with and without smear effects. We also observe a significant enhancement in the distribution of $\cos (2\phi )$ for ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ pairs. Our results provide a baseline for future studies of other higher order corrections beyond Born approximation and medium effects in the lepton pair production.

Comments: 19 pages, 10 figures