Speaker
Description
Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce the strongest electromagnetic fields in the known Universe..
These highly-Lorentz contracted fields 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 talk I will review the recent experimental progress in measuring photon-mediated processes both in ultra-peripheral and in heavy-ion collisions with nuclear overlap where these purely electromagnetic processes may provide a pristine probe of the produced medium. The theoretical description of these processes will be outlined to guide the discussion of the physics implications and future prospects related to photon-mediated processes.
