physics of ultra-peripheral collisions at rhic and lhc

The creation of electron-positron pairs from the vacuum by strong electromagnetic fields is a fundamental and one of the most fascinating processes of relativistic quantum mechanics. Fields sufficiently strong to induce pair creation can be produced, for example, in collisions of bare ions. The process has been studied intensively both in theory and experiment since the 1980s. In peripheral relativistic heavy-ion collisions electromagnetic fields are very strong and interact with each other for a very short time. In these strong fields, probabilities of various electromagnetic processes such as free pair production, bound-free pair production and excitation are large and increase with the Lorentz factor γ. Measurement of cross sections and other relevant distributions are very important for understanding the strong field effect.