Tomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions.

A linearly polarized photon can be quantized from the Lorentz-boosted electromagnetic field of a nucleus traveling at ultrarelativistic speed. When two relativistic heavy nuclei pass one another at a distance of a few nuclear radii, the photon from one nucleus may interact through a virtual quark-antiquark pair with gluons from the other nucleus, forming a short-lived vector meson (e.g., ρ). In this experiment, the polarization was used in diffractive photoproduction to observe a unique spin interference pattern in the angular distribution of ρ → ππ decays. The observed interference is a result of an overlap of two wave functions at a distance an order of magnitude larger than the ρ travel distance within its lifetime. The strong-interaction nuclear radii were extracted from these diffractive interactions and found to be 6.53 ± 0.06 fm (Au) and 7.29 ± 0.08 fm (U), larger than the nuclear charge radii. The observable is demonstrated to be sensitive to the nuclear geometry and quantum interference of nonidentical particles.