Eur. Phys. J. A (2000) 8: 537-548
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100500070076

Inclusive meson production in peripheral collisions of ultrarelativistic heavy ions

¹ Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow State University, 119899, Moscow, Russia
² Institute for Nuclear Research, Russian Academy of Science, 117312, Moscow, Russia
³ Niels Bohr Institute, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark
⁴ Kurchatov Institute, Russian Research Center, 123182, Moscow, Russia

^* e-mail: const@lav1.npi.msu.su

Received: 23 February 2000
Revised: 5 July 2000
Published online: 15 August 2000

Abstract

There exist several proposals to use Weizsäcker-Williams photons generated by ultrarelativistic heavy ions to produce exotic particles in γγ fusion reactions. To estimate the background conditions for such reactions we analyze various mechanisms of meson production in very peripheral collisions of ultrarelativistic heavy ions at RHIC and LHC energies. Besides the γγ fusion they include also electromagnetic γA interactions and strong nucleon-nucleon interactions in grazing AA collisions. All these processes are characterised by low multiplicities of produced particles. The γA an d AA events are simulated by corresponding Monte Carlo codes, RELDIS and FRITIOF. In each of these processes a certain fraction of pions is produced close to the mid-rapidity regionthat gives a background for the γγ events. The possibility of selecting the mesons produced in the γγ fusion events via different p _t cut procedures is demonstrated.