Probing colored glass via qq̄ photoproduction Original Research Article

In this paper, we calculate the cross section for the photoproduction of quark–antiquark pairs in the peripheral collision of ultra-relativistic nuclei, by treating the color field of the nuclei within the Color Glass Condensate model. We find that this cross section is sensitive to the saturation scale Qs2 that characterizes the model. In particular, the transverse momentum spectrum of the produced pairs could be used to measure the properties of the color glass condensate.