Photon-Photon Luminosities in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions at LHC Energies

Abstract

Effective photon-photon luminosities are calculated for various realistic hadron collider scenarios. The main characteristics of photon-photon processes at relativistic heavy-ion colliders are established and compared to the corresponding photon-photon luminosities at electron-positron and future Photon Linear Colliders (PLC). Higher order corrections as well as inelastic processes are discussed. It is concluded that feasible high luminosity Ca-Ca collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are an interesting option for photon-photon physics up to about 100 GeV photon-photon CM energy.

Comments: REVTeX, 13 pages, 10 figures (uuencoded,compressed postscript)