Exclusive LHC physics with heavy ions: SuperChic 3
Abstract
We present results of the updated SuperChic 3 Monte Carlo event generator for central exclusive production. This extends the previous treatment of proton-proton collisions to include heavy ion (pA and AA) beams, for both photon and QCD-initiated production, the first time such a unified treatment of exclusive processes has been presented in a single generator. To achieve this we have developed a theory of the gap survival factor in heavy ion collisions, which allows us to derive some straightforward results about the scaling of the corresponding cross sections. We compare against the recent ATLAS and CMS measurements of light-by-light scattering at the LHC, in lead-lead collisions. We find that the background from QCD-initiated production is expected to be very small, in contrast to some earlier estimates. We also present results from new photon-initiated processes that can now be generated, namely the production of axion-like particles, monopole pairs and monopolium, top quark pair production, and the inclusion of loops in light-by-light scattering.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1810.06567,
title = {Exclusive LHC physics with heavy ions: SuperChic 3},
author = {L. A. Harland-Lang and V. A. Khoze and M. G. Ryskin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.06567},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
25 pages, 9 figures. Eq. (4), Fig. 6 and numbers in Table 2 corrected