Two-Photon Interactions with Nuclear Breakup in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

Highly charged relativistic heavy ions have high cross-sections for two-photon interactions.

• The photon flux is high enough that two-photon interactions may be accompanied by additional photonuclear interactions.
• Except for the shared impact parameter, these interactions are independent.
• Additional interactions like mutual Coulomb excitation are of experimental interest, since the neutrons from the nuclear dissociation provide a simple, relatively unbiased trigger.