English

A light-fronts approach to electron-positron pair production in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

Atomic Physics 2009-10-30 v1 Nuclear Theory Accelerator Physics

Abstract

We perform a gauge-transformation on the time-dependent Dirac equation describing the evolution of an electron in a heavy-ion collision to remove the explicit dependence on the long-range part of the interaction. We solve, in an ultra-relativistic limit, the gauged-transformed Dirac equation using light-front variables and a light-fronts representation, obtaining non-perturbative results for the free pair-creation amplitudes in the collider frame. Our result reproduces the result of second-order perturbation theory in the small charge limit while non-perturbative effects arise for realistic charges of the ions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/9710008,
  title  = {A light-fronts approach to electron-positron pair production in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions},
  author = {B. Segev and J. C. Wells},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/9710008},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

39 pages, Revtex, 7 figures, submitted to PRA