STARlight: A Monte Carlo simulation program for ultra-peripheral collisions of relativistic ions

By S. Klein, J. Nystrand, J. Seger, Y. Gorbunov, J. Butterworth. Computer Physics Communications, 2016

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Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) have been a significant source of study at RHIC and the LHC. In these collisions, the two colliding nuclei interact electromagnetically, via two-photon or photonuclear interactions, but not hadronically; they effectively miss each other. Photonuclear interactions produce vector meson states or more general photonuclear final states, while two-photon interactions can produce lepton or meson pairs, or single mesons. In these interactions, the collision geometry plays a major role. We present a program, STARlight, that calculates the cross-sections for a variety of UPC final states and also creates, via Monte Carlo simulation, events for use in determining detector efficiency.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e3812be08466edb18d0b2bbe3aff3025a9b8b2c