Accessing transverse nucleon and gluon distributions in heavy nuclei using coherent vector meson photoproduction at high energies in ion ultraperipheral collisions

Abstract

By using the theoretical approaches describing well the available data on $t$-integrated coherent photoproduction of light and heavy vector mesons in Pb-Pb ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Run 1, we calculate the momentum transfer distributions for this process for $\rho$ and $J/\psi$ vector mesons in the kinematics of Run 2 at the LHC. We demonstrate that nuclear shadowing not only suppresses the absolute value of the cross sections, but also shifts the momentum transfer distributions toward smaller values of the momentum transfer $|t|$. This result can be interpreted as a broadening in the impact parameter space of the effective nucleon density in nuclei by 14\% in the case of $\rho$ and the nuclear gluon distribution by $5-11$\% in the case of $J/\psi$.

10 pages, 5 figures. Matches the final published version

References in corpus (5)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• J/Psi production in ultraperipheral Pb+Pb and p+Pb collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
• Exclusive diffractive processes in electron-ion collisions
• Investigation of diffractive photoproduction of $J/\Psi$ in hadronic collisions
• Light vector meson photoproduction in hadron-hadron and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Mining for Gluon Saturation at Colliders
• Study of spin-dependent structure functions of ${}^3\mathrm{He}$ and ${}^3\mathrm{H}$ at NNLO approximation and corresponding nuclear corrections
• Inclusive diffractive heavy quarkonium photoproduction in pp, pA and AA collisions
• New opportunities at the photon energy frontier
• Parton distribution functions with QED corrections in the valon model