Abstract
The cross section for coherent photoproduction in Pb-Pb collisions is the sum of two contributions: one from low-energy and the other from high-energy photon-nucleus interactions. A novel method to disentangle the two contributions, allowing one to extract the coherent photo-nuclear cross section for coherent production, , is presented. The utility of the method is demonstrated using measurements from peripheral and ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Applying the proposed method to the available data, it is possible to obtain up to a photon-lead center-of-mass energy of 470 GeV, which corresponds to of . To illustrate a possible use of the extracted photonuclear cross sections, the corresponding nuclear suppression factors are computed and they are compared to predictions of gluon shadowing calculated in the leading-twist approximation approach.
- Received 20 September 2016
- Revised 7 March 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.96.015203
©2017 American Physical Society