Flavor-dependent photoproduction in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Strong electromagnetic fields produced in the non-central heavy-ion collisions can indue vector meson photoproduction. In this paper, we study the photoproduction $J/\psi$ and $\phi$ mesons in the relativistic heavy-ion collision from Ultra-peripheral nuclear collisions(UPC) to peripheral Hadronic Heavy Ion Collisions(HHIC). And then include both initial hadronic production and thermal production in quark-gluon plasma(QGP). We find, for charm anti-charm bound state $J/\psi$, the photoproduced $J/\psi$s are mainly in very low momentum region and clearly exceed the hadronic production. However, considering the thermal production of strange quark anti-quark pairs in QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the photoproduced $\phi$ is usually smaller than the thermal production and only evident at very peripheral collisions even their photoproduction is much larger than $J/\psi$.