Photoproduction of top in peripheral heavy ion collisions

الأصل · EN

In relativistic heavy ion collisions, top quarks can be produced by photon-gluon fusion when a photon from the Weizsäcker-Williams virtual photon field of one nucleus interacts with a gluon in the other nucleus. Photoproduction with heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the first accessible non-hadronic top production channel. We calculate the t t photoproduction cross sections, pair mass and top quark rapidity distributions in peripheral heavy ion collisions. The cross sections are sensitive to the top quark charge and the large-Q² gluon distribution in the nucleus. We find a cross section of 94 pb in calcium-calcium collisions, leading to 190 pairs in a one month (10⁶ sec) LHC run. We also find pPb and pCa cross sections of 5.8 and 3.4 pb respectively, resulting in 6 and 34 t t pairs per month.