Observation of Forward Neutron Multiplicity Dependence of Dimuon Acoplanarity in Ultraperipheral Pb-Pb Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=5.02 TeV

Abstract

The first measurement of the dependence of $γγ→μ^+μ^−$ 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 $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=5.02 TeV, with an integrated luminosity of approximately 1.5 nb$^{-1}$, are collected using the CMS detector at the LHC. The azimuthal correlations between the two muons in the invariant mass region 88.3. 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.Physical review letters 127(12), 122001 (1-19) (2021). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.122001Published by APS, College Park, Md.