Tomography of Ultra-relativistic Nuclei with Polarized Photon-gluon Collisions

Abstract

A linearly polarized photon can be quantized from the Lorentz-boosted electromagnetic field of a nucleus traveling at ultra-relativistic speed. When two relativistic heavy nuclei pass one another at a distance of a few nuclear radii, the photon from one nucleus may interact through a virtual quark-antiquark pair with gluons from the other nucleus forming a short-lived vector meson (e.g. ${\rho }^0$). In this experiment, the polarization was utilized in diffractive photoproduction to observe a unique spin interference pattern in the angular distribution of ${\rho }^0\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ decays. The observed interference is a result of an overlap of two wave functions at a distance an order of magnitude larger than the ${\rho }^0$ travel distance within its lifetime. The strong-interaction nuclear radii were extracted from these diffractive interactions, and found to be $6.53\pm 0.06$ fm (${}^{197}\mathrm{Au}$) and $7.29\pm 0.08$ fm (${}^{238}\mathrm{U}$), larger than the nuclear charge radii. The observable is demonstrated to be sensitive to the nuclear geometry and quantum interference of non-identical particles.

References in corpus (8)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Nuclear symmetry energy probed by neutron skin thickness of nuclei
• Probing the linear polarization of photons in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions
• Mapping the Electromagnetic Fields of Heavy-Ion Collisions with the Breit-Wheeler Process
• Observation of Two-source Interference in the Photoproduction Reaction $AuAu\to AuAu{\rho }^0$
• Interference effects in quantum-optical coherence tomography using spectrally engineered photon pairs
• Extracting the rho meson wavefunction from HERA data
• Evidence for Nonlinear Gluon Effects in QCD and their $A$ Dependence at STAR

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• Challenges to the Good-Walker paradigm in coherent and incoherent photoproduction
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• Determining the neutron skin thickness by relativistic semi-isobaric collisions
• Measurement of the impact-parameter dependent azimuthal anisotropy in coherent ${\rho }^0$ photoproduction in Pb$-$Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV
• Probing gluon fluctuations in nuclei with the first energy-dependent measurement of incoherent J/$\psi$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral PbPb collisions
• Azimuthal decorrelation for photon induced dijet production in ultra-peripheral collisions of heavy ions
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• Constraining axion-gluon coupling in monohadron processes
• Nuclear deformation effects in photoproduction of $\rho$ mesons in ultraperipheral isobaric collisions
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• Rescattering effects on spin-interference for ${\rho }^0$ photoproduction in heavy-ion collisions
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