2-PHOTON PHYSICS WITH ULTRAHIGH-ENERGY HEAVY-ION BEAMS

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions become interesting as a source of intense beams of photons, where the two-photon production of particles like the Higgs boson can be studied, when the nuclear charges act coherently. To exclude contributions from the strong interaction the nuclei are treated as two non-overlapping black discs in impact parameter space and the results are compared to calculations which account for the nuclear size by the elastic form factor. The cross sections for the production of an intermediate-mass Higgs boson and of pairs of heavy fermions, vector bosons and charged supersymmetric particles are shown for hadron colliders like the LHC and SSC. © 1990.