Lattice calculation for lepton capture from vacuum-pair production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The new colliding-beam heavy-ion accelerators, designed to investigate nuclear matter at high temperatures and densities, have motivated great interest during the last decade concerning possible new electromagnetic phenomena. One of the most interesting of these processes is the sparking of the vacuum to produce lepton-antilepton pairs. The process of electron capture from vacuum pair production is a principal beam-loss mechanism for highly charged relativistic ions in a storage ring, and thus must be considered in the design and the operation of these machines. In this paper, we present calculated impact-parameter-dependent probabilities and cross sections for muon capture from vacuum production in collisions of relativistic heavy ions by solving the time-dependent Dirac equation in unrestricted three-dimensional space using lattice-collocation techniques. Calculations are performed for muon-pair production with capture into the K-shell in collisions of 197Au + 197Au at collider kinetic energies of 2 GeV per nucleon.