Tomography of Ultra-relativistic Nuclei with Polarized Photon-gluon Collisions
Nuclear Experiment
2024-01-30 v1 Nuclear Theory
Quantum Physics
Abstract
A linearly polarized photon can be quantized from the Lorentz-boosted electromagnetic field of a nucleus traveling at ultra-relativistic speed. When two relativistic heavy nuclei pass one another at a distance of a few nuclear radii, the photon from one nucleus may interact through a virtual quark-antiquark pair with gluons from the other nucleus forming a short-lived vector meson (e.g. ). In this experiment, the polarization was utilized in diffractive photoproduction to observe a unique spin interference pattern in the angular distribution of decays. The observed interference is a result of an overlap of two wave functions at a distance an order of magnitude larger than the travel distance within its lifetime. The strong-interaction nuclear radii were extracted from these diffractive interactions, and found to be fm () and fm (), larger than the nuclear charge radii. The observable is demonstrated to be sensitive to the nuclear geometry and quantum interference of non-identical particles.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.01625,
title = {Tomography of Ultra-relativistic Nuclei with Polarized Photon-gluon Collisions},
author = {STAR Collaboration and M. S. Abdallah and B. E. Aboona and J. Adam and L. Adamczyk and J. R. Adams and J. K. Adkins and G. Agakishiev and I. Aggarwal and M. M. Aggarwal and Z. Ahammed and A. Aitbaev and I. Alekseev and D. M. Anderson and A. Aparin and E. C. Aschenauer and M. U. Ashraf and F. G. Atetalla and G. S. Averichev and V. Bairathi and W. Baker and J. G. Ball Cap and K. Barish and A. Behera and R. Bellwied and P. Bhagat and A. Bhasin and J. Bielcik and J. Bielcikova and I. G. Bordyuzhin and J. D. Brandenburg and A. V. Brandin and X. Z. Cai and H. Caines and M. Calderón de la Barca Sánchez and D. Cebra and I. Chakaberia and P. Chaloupka and B. K. Chan and F-H. Chang and Z. Chang and A. Chatterjee and S. Chattopadhyay and D. Chen and J. Chen and J. H. Chen and X. Chen and Z. Chen and J. Cheng and S. Choudhury and W. Christie and X. Chu and H. J. Crawford and M. Csanád and M. Daugherity and T. G. Dedovich and I. M. Deppner and A. A. Derevschikov and A. Dhamija and L. Di Carlo and L. Didenko and P. Dixit and X. Dong and J. L. Drachenberg and E. Duckworth and J. C. Dunlop and J. Engelage and G. Eppley and S. Esumi and O. Evdokimov and A. Ewigleben and O. Eyser and R. Fatemi and F. M. Fawzi and S. Fazio and C. J. Feng and Y. Feng and E. Finch and Y. Fisyak and A. Francisco and C. Fu and C. A. Gagliardi and T. Galatyuk and F. Geurts and N. Ghimire and A. Gibson and K. Gopal and X. Gou and D. Grosnick and A. Gupta and W. Guryn and A. Hamed and Y. Han and S. Harabasz and M. D. Harasty and J. W. Harris and H. Harrison and S. He and W. He and X. H. He and Y. He and S. Heppelmann and N. Herrmann and E. Hoffman and L. Holub and C. Hu and Q. Hu and Y. Hu and H. Huang and H. Z. Huang and S. L. Huang and T. Huang and X. Huang and Y. Huang and T. J. Humanic and D. Isenhower and M. Isshiki and W. W. Jacobs and C. Jena and A. Jentsch and Y. Ji and J. Jia and K. Jiang and X. Ju and E. G. Judd and S. Kabana and M. L. Kabir and S. Kagamaster and D. Kalinkin and K. Kang and D. Kapukchyan and K. Kauder and H. W. Ke and D. Keane and A. Kechechyan and M. Kelsey and D. P. Kikoła and B. Kimelman and D. Kincses and I. Kisel and A. Kiselev and S. R. Klein and A. G. Knospe and H. S. Ko and L. Kochenda and A. Korobitsin and L. K. Kosarzewski and L. Kramarik and P. Kravtsov and L. Kumar and S. Kumar and R. Kunnawalkam Elayavalli and J. H. Kwasizur and R. Lacey and S. Lan and J. M. Landgraf and J. Lauret and A. Lebedev and R. Lednicky and J. H. Lee and Y. H. Leung and N. Lewis and C. Li and C. Li and W. Li and X. Li and Y. Li and Y. Li and X. Liang and Y. Liang and R. Licenik and T. Lin and Y. Lin and M. A. Lisa and F. Liu and H. Liu and H. Liu and P. Liu and T. Liu and X. Liu and Y. Liu and Z. Liu and T. Ljubicic and W. J. Llope and R. S. Longacre and E. Loyd and T. Lu and N. S. Lukow and X. F. Luo and L. Ma and R. Ma and Y. G. Ma and N. Magdy and D. Mallick and S. L. Manukhov and S. Margetis and C. Markert and H. S. Matis and J. A. Mazer and N. G. Minaev and S. Mioduszewski and B. Mohanty and M. M. Mondal and I. Mooney and D. A. Morozov and A. Mukherjee and M. Nagy and J. D. Nam and Md. Nasim and K. Nayak and D. Neff and J. M. Nelson and D. B. Nemes and M. Nie and G. Nigmatkulov and T. Niida and R. Nishitani and L. V. Nogach and T. Nonaka and A. S. Nunes and G. Odyniec and A. Ogawa and S. Oh and V. A. Okorokov and K. Okubo and B. S. Page and R. Pak and J. Pan and A. Pandav and A. K. Pandey and Y. Panebratsev and P. Parfenov and A. Paul and B. Pawlik and D. Pawlowska and C. Perkins and J. Pluta and B. R. Pokhrel and J. Porter and M. Posik and V. Prozorova and N. K. Pruthi and M. Przybycien and J. Putschke and H. Qiu and A. Quintero and C. Racz and S. K. Radhakrishnan and N. Raha and R. L. Ray and R. Reed and H. G. Ritter and M. Robotkova and J. L. Romero and D. Roy and L. Ruan and A. K. Sahoo and N. R. Sahoo and H. Sako and S. Salur and E. Samigullin and J. Sandweiss and S. Sato and W. B. Schmidke and N. Schmitz and B. R. Schweid and F. Seck and J. Seger and R. Seto and P. Seyboth and N. Shah and E. Shahaliev and P. V. Shanmuganathan and M. Shao and T. Shao and R. Sharma and A. I. Sheikh and D. Y. Shen and S. S. Shi and Y. Shi and Q. Y. Shou and E. P. Sichtermann and R. Sikora and J. Singh and S. Singha and P. Sinha and M. J. Skoby and N. Smirnov and Y. Söhngen and W. Solyst and Y. Song and H. M. Spinka and B. Srivastava and T. D. S. Stanislaus and M. Stefaniak and D. J. Stewart and M. Strikhanov and B. Stringfellow and A. A. P. Suaide and M. Sumbera and X. M. Sun and X. Sun and Y. Sun and Y. Sun and B. Surrow and D. N. Svirida and Z. W. Sweger and P. Szymanski and A. H. Tang and Z. Tang and A. Taranenko and T. Tarnowsky and J. H. Thomas and A. R. Timmins and D. Tlusty and T. Todoroki and M. Tokarev and C. A. Tomkiel and S. Trentalange and R. E. Tribble and P. Tribedy and S. K. Tripathy and T. Truhlar and B. A. Trzeciak and O. D. Tsai and Z. Tu and T. Ullrich and D. G. Underwood and I. Upsal and G. Van Buren and J. Vanek and A. N. Vasiliev and I. Vassiliev and V. Verkest and F. Videbæk and S. Vokal and S. A. Voloshin and F. Wang and G. Wang and J. S. Wang and P. Wang and X. Wang and Y. Wang and Y. Wang and Z. Wang and J. C. Webb and P. C. Weidenkaff and G. D. Westfall and H. Wieman and S. W. Wissink and R. Witt and J. Wu and J. Wu and Y. Wu and B. Xi and Z. G. Xiao and G. Xie and W. Xie and H. Xu and N. Xu and Q. H. Xu and Y. Xu and Z. Xu and Z. Xu and G. Yan and C. Yang and Q. Yang and S. Yang and Y. Yang and Z. Ye and Z. Ye and L. Yi and K. Yip and Y. Yu and H. Zbroszczyk and W. Zha and C. Zhang and D. Zhang and J. Zhang and S. Zhang and S. Zhang and Y. Zhang and Y. Zhang and Y. Zhang and Z. J. Zhang and Z. Zhang and Z. Zhang and F. Zhao and J. Zhao and M. Zhao and C. Zhou and Y. Zhou and X. Zhu and M. Zurek and M. Zyzak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.01625},
year = {2024}
}