Dimuon and ditau production in photon-photon collisions at next-to-leading order in QED

Abstract

Next-to-leading-order (NLO) quantum electrodynamics (QED) corrections to the production of muon and tau pairs in photon-photon collisions, $\gamma \gamma \to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-},{\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$, are calculated in the equivalent photon approximation. We mostly consider $\gamma \gamma$ processes in ultraperipheral collisions of hadrons at the LHC, but the $\gamma \gamma \to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$ process in ${\mathrm{e}}^{+}{\mathrm{e}}^{-}$ collisions at LEP is also discussed. The NLO terms are found to modify the total fiducial cross sections by up to 5%, increasing the tails of the dilepton acoplanarity and transverse momentum distributions, and depleting by up to 15% the yields at high masses, with respect to the leading-order predictions including the very small virtuality of the colliding photons. At the LHC, the calculations obtained with the charge form factor for protons and lead ions including the NLO QED corrections improve the data--theory agreement for all measured differential distributions, and prove an indispensable ingredient for the extraction of precision quantities in photon-photon processes, such as the anomalous magnetic moment of the tau lepton.

Minor additions. Matches published version. 21 pages, 35 plots

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Automated next-to-leading order QCD and electroweak predictions of photon-photon processes in ultraperipheral collisions
• Physics with high-luminosity proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC
• Measurement and effective field theory interpretation of the photon-fusion production cross section of a pair of W bosons in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV
• NNLO QCD corrections to $\gamma \gamma \to Q\bar{Q}$ from Local Unitarity combined with Coulomb resummation and NLO EW effects
• Polarized tau decay and CP violation in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions
• Study $\gamma \gamma \to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$ process including ${\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$ spin information in Pb-Pb ultraperipheral collision and at Lepton collider