Coherent and incoherent production of vector mesons in ultraperipheral collisions of xenon ions within the QCD parton saturation approach

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the exclusive vector meson photoproduction in the recent run using xenon ions at energy of 5.44 TeV performed by the Large Hadron Collider. We focus on the ultraperipheral collisions and provide theoretical predictions for coherent and incoherent cross sections within the color dipole approach and gluon saturation framework. The rapidity distribution is investigated in both cases and comparison to other approaches available in the literature is completed. We show that the expected yields are enough to perform reliable cross section measurements for light mesons as ρ0 and ϕ.