Speaker
Description
Relativistic heavy-ion collisions generate extremely strong electromagnetic fields, providing an ideal environment to study the electromagnetic excitation of the vacuum. The Breit-Wheeler process, the lowest-order decay mode of the QED vacuum excitation into electron-positron pairs, has been experimentally verified by the STAR collaboration, stimulating further investigations of higher-order decay modes, such as baryon-antibaryon and meson-antimeson pairs.
This presentation reports the first measurements of baryon-antibaryon and meson-antimeson pairs from QED vacuum excitation in Au+Au ultra-peripheral collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}} = $ 200 GeV by the STAR experiment. The invariant mass and pair $p_\rm{T}$ distributions are shown. These measurements will shed new light on the understanding of the QED vacuum.
