Speaker
Description
An ultra-intense magnetic field is expected to be created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions with an intensity up to 10$^{15}$ T. These strong magnetic fields are predicted to produce various nonlinear QED behaviors and other interesting phenomena, such as the chiral magnetic effect and quark synchrotron radiation. However, such a magnetic field has not yet been detected experimentally. The decay plane of dileptons from virtual photons is predicted to be anisotropic in the presence of an ultra-intense magnetic field and thus carry information about the existence of the magnetic field.
In this poster, numerical QED calculations for virtual photon polarization will be presented. Moreover, feasibility studies for virtual photon polarization measurements using dimuons with $p_{\rm T}$ > 4 GeV/$c$ reconstructed by the ALICE muon spectrometer in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} =$ 5.02 TeV and 5.5 TeV will be reported. The different sources of background will be explained, and projections for Run 3 with the new Muon Forward Tracker will be shown.
