Electromagnetic processes with quasireal photons in Pb plus Pb collisions: QED, QCD, and the QGP

Abstract

Electromagnetic processes, both photon-photon and photon-nucleus, are shown to be useful in studying aspects of QED, QCD, and potentially the QGP. Using lead-lead collisions at root s(NN) = 5.02 TeV, the ATLAS detector has performed measurements of exclusive dimuon production, light-by-light scattering (via exclusive diphoton production), and photo-nuclear dijet production. These are all important examples of ultraperipheral collisions, where the nuclei do not interact hadronically. A recent study of the opening angles of dimuons produced in hadronic heavy-ion collisions, after subtracting heavy-flavor backgrounds, demonstrates that the dimuons carry information correlated with the overlap geometry, potentially about the density of charges in the QGP itself.