Pair production with electron capture in peripheral collisions of relativistic heavy ions Original Research Article

The production of electron–positron pairs with the capture of the electron in an atomic orbital is investigated for the conditions of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Dirac wave functions for the leptons are used, taking corrections to orders of Zα into account. The dependence on the transverse momentum transfer is studied and the accuracy of the equivalent photon approximation is discussed as a function of the nuclear charge.