Peripheral heavy ion collisions as a probe of the nuclear gluon distribution -: art. no. 054905

At high energies a quark-gluon plasma is expected to be formed in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider. The theoretical description of these processes is directly associated to a complete knowledge of the details of medium effects in the nuclear gluon distribution. In this paper we analyze the possibility to constrain the behavior of this distribution considering peripheral heavy ion collisions. We reanalyze the photoproduction of heavy quarks for the deduction of the in-medium gluon distribution using three current parametrizations for this parton distribution. Moreover, we show that the elastic photoproduction of vector mesons is a potential process to probe the nuclear gluon distribution.