Heavy lepton pair production in nucleus–nucleus collisions at LHC energy – a case study

We present a study of image lepton pair production in Pb + Pb collisions at image. The larger image mass (∼1.77 GeV) compared to image and image leads to considerably small hadronic contribution to the image pair invariant mass (M) distribution relative to the production from thermal partonic sources. The quark–anti-quark annihilation processes via intermediary virtual photon, Z and Higgs bosons have been considered for the production of image. We observe that the contribution from Drell–Yan process dominates over thermal yield for image pair mass from 4 to 20 GeV at the LHC energy. We also present the ratio of τ lepton pair yields for nucleus–nucleus collisions relative to yields from image collisions scaled by number of binary collisions at LHC energies as a function τ pair mass. The ratio is found to be significantly above unity for the mass range 4 to 6 GeV. This indicates the possibility of detecting image pair from quark–gluon plasma (QGP) in the mass window image.