Photoproduction of rho0 in ultra--peripheral nuclear collisions at ALICE

Abstract

Photoproduction of ${\rho }^0$ mesons in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions has been studied by the ALICE Collaboration at the CERN LHC. The strong photon flux associated with relativistic charged nuclei leads to a very large cross section for exclusive photoproduction of ${\rho }^0$ meson in interactions of the type $Pb+Pb\to Pb+Pb+{\rho }^0$. For a ${\rho }^0$ produced at mid-rapidity at the LHC, the photon-nucleus center of mass energy is higher than in any previous experiment. The ALICE detector is a general purpose detector dedicated to study heavy--ion collisions. ALICE has excellent performance in the low $p_T$ region, and can reconstruct charged particle tracks with 0.1 GeV/c $\le p_T\le 100$ GeV/c. In this analysis all tracks were required to be within ALICE's central barrel. Analysis of data from the first heavy ion run at the LHC in 2010 will be discussed in this paper.

8 pages, 8 figures, prepared for the Proceedings of the International Workshop On Physics At The LHC (Kruger 2012) December 3 - 7, 2012 Protea Hotel, Kruger Gate South Africa

References in corpus (3)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Vector Meson Production in Coherent Hadronic Interactions: An update on predictions for RHIC and LHC
• Particle Identification in the ALICE Experiment