Eur. Phys. J. C (2006) 45: 783-795
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s2005-02452-1

Theoretical Physics

Lepton-pair production from deep inelastic scatteringin peripheral relativistic heavy ion collisions

Institute of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstr. 82, 4056, Basel, Switzerland

Received: 8 August 2005
Revised: 28 October 2005
Published online: 21 December 2005

Abstract

We calculate the inelastic electron- and muon-pair production in peripheral relativistic heavy ion collisions in the region of large Q ² of one of the photons. This offers a possibility to study the quark distribution functions in ions in "ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions". The calculations are compared with those making use of the equivalent photon and the equivalent lepton approximation. We compare the results for Pb-Pb and Pb-p collisions at RHIC (γ ≈ 100) and LHC (γ ≈ 3000) energies. Furthermore we include nuclear modifications to the parton distribution functions in our calculations to study their effect on the cross sections.