Exclusive $\rho$ and $J/\Psi$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral $pO$ and $OO$ collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Collisions with Oxygen ions at the LHC opens the possibility of investigating the description of the QCD dynamics in an unexplored regime, complementary to those performed in $pp$, $pPb$ and $PbPb$ collisions. In this paper we estimate the exclusive $\rho$ and $J/\Psi$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral $pO$ and $OO$ collisions at the Large Hadron Collider using the color dipole formalism and considering distinct models for the dipole - target scattering amplitude and different approaches for the modelling of the vector meson wave function. We present our predictions for the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions, as well as for the total cross sections considering the rapidity ranges covered by the ALICE and LHCb detectors. Such results indicate that a future experimental analysis of these final states is feasible and that its study can be useful to improve our understanding of the QCD dynamics at high energies.