Flavor-dependent photoproduction in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Strong electromagnetic fields produced in the non-central heavy-ion collisions can induce vector meson photoproduction. In this paper, we study the photoproduction J/ψ and ϕ mesons in the relativistic heavy-ion collision from ultra-peripheral nuclear collisions to peripheral hadronic heavy ion collisions. And then include both initial hadronic production and thermal production in quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We find, for the charm anti-charm bound state J/ψ, the photoproduced J/ψs are mainly in the very low momentum region and clearly exceed the hadronic production. However, considering the thermal production of strange quark anti-quark pairs in QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the photoproduced ϕ is usually smaller than the thermal production and only evident at very peripheral collisions as even their photoproduction is much larger than J/ψ.