The e+, e- background at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generated by beam crossing

At the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), fully stripped heavy ions will circulate in each of two rings up to beam energies of 250 (Z/A) GeV/u. During the beam crossing, the peripheral electromagnetic interaction between the heavy ions is sufficient to induce copious production of di-lepton pairs. These pairs are a potential source of background for the detectors at RHIC. In this paper we discuss the expected number of e+,e- pairs, given the accepted initial luminosity value L of the collider. More importantly, we also calculate the differential cross sections for the angle, energy, rapidity and momentum distribution of the leptons. Using the luminosity L of the collider, these differential cross sections are normalized to the expected number of leptons per second. We restrict ourselves to e+,e- production, a discussion of μ+,μ- and τ+τ- distributions will be published later. The results are presented for the expected worst case, namely 197Au79+ ions at a beam kinetic energy of 100 GeV/u. This is forseen to be the heaviest ion for high luminosity experiments at RHIC. We note for a given energy, the cross section for e+,e- production scales as Z4, where Z is the atomic number of the ions