Communications in Theoretical Physics ›› 2021, Vol. 73 ›› Issue (12): 125301. doi: 10.1088/1572-9494/ac3231

• Nuclear Physics • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Flavor-dependent photoproduction in heavy-ion collisions

Zhuoxuan Xie1,Ruilin Han2   

  1. 1Department of Physics, University of Rochester, NY 14627, United States of America
    2Tianjin Xinhua High School, Tianjin 300350, China
  • Received: 2021-08-30 Revised: 2021-10-18 Accepted: 2021-10-22 Published: 2021-12-01
  • Contact: Zhuoxuan Xie

Abstract:

Strong electromagnetic fields produced in the non-central heavy-ion collisions can induce vector meson photoproduction. In this paper, we study the photoproduction J/ψ and φ mesons in the relativistic heavy-ion collision from ultra-peripheral nuclear collisions to peripheral hadronic heavy ion collisions. And then include both initial hadronic production and thermal production in quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We find, for the charm anti-charm bound state J/ψ, the photoproduced J/ψs are mainly in the very low momentum region and clearly exceed the hadronic production. However, considering the thermal production of strange quark anti-quark pairs in QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the photoproduced φ is usually smaller than the thermal production and only evident at very peripheral collisions as even their photoproduction is much larger than J/ψ.

Key words: relativistic heavy ion collisions, photoproduction, quark gluon plasma, charmonium production