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 [R.-j. Wang, S. Pu, and Q. Wang, Phys. Rev. D 104, 056011 (2021)]. We present the numerical results for the distributions of the transverse momentum, azimuthal angle and invariant mass for ${e}^{+}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ and ${\ensuremath{\mu}}^{+}{\ensuremath{\mu}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ pairs as functions of the impact parameter and other kinematic variables in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ 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 $\mathrm{cos}(2\ensuremath{\varphi})$ for ${\ensuremath{\mu}}^{+}{\ensuremath{\mu}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ 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.