Effects of the magnetic field on ${\pi }^0$ production in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions

Abstract

In this work, we study the effect of the magnetic field on the production of neutral pions in photon-photon interactions in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC. The calculation is performed within the equivalent photon approximation, including a magnetic-field dependence in the decay width $\Gamma ({\pi }^0\to \gamma \gamma )$, from which the corresponding production cross section is computed. We find that the reduction of the two-photon decay width in the presence of a strong magnetic field leads to a substantial reduction (by a factor of about 2-3) of the ${\pi }^0$ production cross section at LHC energies.

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures; talk presented at the Workshop of Advances in QCD at the LHC and the EIC, CBPF, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 9-15 2025