At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for example, virtual photons produce many particles. At small impact parameters where the colliding nuclei make peripheral collisions, photon fluxes are very large and these are responsible for the multiple photonuclear interactions. Free pair productions, bound free pair productions, and nuclear Coulomb excitations are important examples of such interactions, and these processes play important roles in the beam luminosity at RHIC and LHC. Here we obtained the impact parameter dependence of bound free pair production cross sections and by using this probability we obtained bound free electron-positron pair production with nuclear breakup for heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. We also compared our results to the other calculations.

• Received 18 February 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.83.014902