Processes in Peripheral Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

The proposed ultrarelativistic collider LHC at CERN, which is mainly destined for a pp collider mode, will also be used for a heavy-ion collider mode. The heavy ions could be accelerated up to 3.5 TeV/u. Such ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions could be used to investigate the formation and decay of a possible quark-gluon plasma; another application could be the production of new particles. In peripheral collisions new particles could be produced coherently via the strong transverse electromagnetic fields; cross sections scale with Z 4 ≈ 107, where Z is the nuclear charge number, with respect to corresponding e + e -collider production cross sections. The maximum frequency contained in the electromagnetic fields goes as the inverse of the Lorentz contracted nuclear radius ω max = γ/R, which turns out to be ω max ≈ 100GeV for LHC; as a consequence two photon fusion processes could produce particles, which have masses of the same order of magnitude as heavy nuclei. Such exotic particles are for example Higgs bosons, supersymmetric particles or glueballs.