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Mapping the electromagnetic fields of heavy-ion collisions with the Breit-Wheeler process

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Abstract

Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions are expected to produce the strongest electromagnetic fields in the known Universe. These highly-Lorentz contracted fields can manifest themselves as linearly polarized quasi-real photons that can interact via the Breit-Wheeler process to produce lepton anti-lepton pairs. The energy and momentum distribution of the produced dileptons carry information about the strength and spatial distribution of the colliding fields. Recently it has been demonstrated that photons from these fields can interact even in heavy-ion collisions with hadronic overlap, providing a purely electromagnetic probe of the produced medium. In this review we discuss the recent theoretical progress and experimental advances for mapping the ultra-strong electromagnetic fields produced in heavy-ion collisions via measurement of the Breit-Wheeler process.

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Data Availability Statement

This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited. [Authors’ comment: All data can be acquired from the corresponding references, from which the figures/data are reproduced.]

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Jian Zhou, Bowen Xiao, Zebo Tang, Wei Li, Dr. Lijuan Ruan, Spencer Klein, Shuai Yang, and Chi Yang for their stimulating discussion. This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 11775213 and 11675168, the U.S. DOE Office of Science under contract No. de-sc0012704, DE-FG02-10ER41666, and DE-AC02-98CH10886, DOE Brookhaven National Laboratory LDRD 18-037, and by MOST under Grant No. 2016YFE0104800.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, 11973-5000, USA

    J. D. Brandenburg & Z. Xu

  2. Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science affiliate at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-38000, USA

    J. D. Brandenburg

  3. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    W. Zha

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  1. J. D. Brandenburg
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  2. W. Zha
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  3. Z. Xu
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Correspondence to J. D. Brandenburg.

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Communicated by Carsten Urbach

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Brandenburg, J.D., Zha, W. & Xu, Z. Mapping the electromagnetic fields of heavy-ion collisions with the Breit-Wheeler process. Eur. Phys. J. A 57, 299 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-021-00595-5

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