Exclusive coherent production of heavy vector mesons in nucleus-nucleus collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Heavy nuclei at collider energies are a source of high-energy Weizsäcker-Williams photons. This photon flux may be utilized to study high-energy photon-nucleus interactions. Here we concentrate on the coherent diffractive production of heavy vector mesons on nuclear targets and show how it probes the unintegrated glue of the nucleus in the saturation domain. We present predictions for rapidity distributions of exclusive coherent $J/\Psi$ and ${\rm Y}$ mesons which can be measured by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.86.014905 ©2012 American Physical Society