Electron-positron pair production in the external electromagnetic field of colliding relativistic heavy ions

Abstract

The results concerning the $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ production in peripheral highly relativistic heavy-ion collisions presented in a recent paper by Baltz {\em{et al.}} are rederived in a very straightforward manner. It is shown that the solution of the Dirac equation directly leads to the multiplicity, i.e. to the total number of electron-positron pairs produced by the electromagnetic field of the ions, whereas the calculation of the single pair production probability is much more involved. A critical observation concerns the unsolved problem of seemingly absent Coulomb corrections (Bethe-Maximon corrections) in pair production cross sections. It is shown that neither the inclusion of the vacuum-vacuum amplitude nor the correct interpretation of the solution of the Dirac equation concerning the pair multiplicity is able the explain (from a fundamental point of view) the absence of Coulomb corrections. Therefore the contradiction has to be accounted to the treatment of the high energy limit.

6 pages, 4 Postscript figures, uses svjour.cls/svepj.clo

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Physics of Ultra-Peripheral Nuclear Collisions
• Electron-Positron Pair Production in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Existence of a stable polarized vacuum in the Bogoliubov-Dirac-Fock approximation
• Multiphoton Exchange Processes in Ultraperipheral Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Self-consistent solution for the polarized vacuum in a no-photon QED model
• Quark-antiquark pair production in space-time dependent fields
• Photoproduction of relativistic QED bound states in hadronic collisions
• Impact parameter dependence of heavy ion e+ e- pair production to all orders in Z alpha
• Calculation of heavy ion e+ e- pair production to all orders in Z alpha