Enhancement of low-mass dileptons in ultraperipheral collisions

It is shown that production of low-mass $$e^+e^-$$ e + e - -pairs in ultraperipheral nuclear collisions is enhanced due to the Sommerfeld–Gamow–Sakharov (SGS) factor. This effect is especially strong near the threshold of creation of unbound $$e^+e^-$$ e + e - -pairs with low masses in the two-photon fusion. Coulomb attraction of the non-relativistic components of such pairs may lead to the increased intensity of 511 keV photons. It can be recorded at the NICA collider and has some astrophysical implications. The analogous effect can be observed at LHC in dilepton production.

Quark-sector Lorentz violation in Z-boson production

Quark-sector Lorentz violation is studied in the context of Drell-Yan dilepton production including effects from Z-boson exchange. We show the chiral nature of the weak interactions enables parity-violating and spin-dependent effects to be studied using unpolarized initial states. Constraints are placed on dimensionless and CPT-even coefficients for Lorentz violation for the first two generations of quarks using measurements from the Large Hadron Collider.

Shift-type SMEFT effects in dileptons at the LHC

We explore the constraints which can be derived on Wilson coefficients in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory from dilepton production, notably including the constraints on operators which do not lead to cross sections growing with energy relative to the Standard Model rate, i.e. shifts. We incorporate essential theory error estimates from higher EFT orders in the analysis in order to provide robust bounds. We find that constraints on four-fermion operator contributions which do grow with energy are not materially weakened by the inclusion of these shifts, and that a constraint on the shifts can also be derived, with a characteristic strength comparable to, and a directionality in parameter space complementary to, those from LEP data. This completes the study of hadronically-quiet dilepton production in the SMEFT, and provides two new constraints which are linearly independent from others arising at the LHC and also rotated in Wilson coefficient space relative to, though not completely independent from, the LEP bounds.