Abstract
The first measurement of the dependence of production on the multiplicity of neutrons emitted very close to the beam direction in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions is reported. Data for lead-lead interactions at , with an integrated luminosity of approximately , are collected using the CMS detector at the LHC. The azimuthal correlations between the two muons in the invariant mass region are extracted for events including 0, 1, or at least 2 neutrons detected in the forward pseudorapidity range . The back-to-back correlation structure from leading-order photon-photon scattering is found to be significantly broader for events with a larger number of emitted neutrons from each nucleus, corresponding to interactions with a smaller impact parameter. This observation provides a data-driven demonstration that the average transverse momentum of photons emitted from relativistic heavy ions has an impact parameter dependence. These results provide new constraints on models of photon-induced interactions in ultraperipheral collisions. They also provide a baseline to search for possible final-state effects on lepton pairs caused by traversing a quark-gluon plasma produced in hadronic heavy ion collisions.
- Received 10 November 2020
- Revised 20 April 2021
- Accepted 21 July 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.122001
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© 2021 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration