Born-Infeld Nonlinear Electromagnetism in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

W. Pricea, M. Formanekb, J. Rafelskia aDepartment of Physics, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA bELI Beamlines facility, The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC, 252 41 Dolní Břežany, Czech Republic

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We study the effect of the limiting field strength of Born-Infeld electromagnetism on the dynamics of charged particle scattering. We formulate the Born-Infeld limiting field in an invariant manner, showing that it is the electric field-dominated eigenvalue ``a'' of the field tensor Fμν which is limited rather than the individual field vectors. Heavy ion collisions in particular provide uniquely large values of the field invariants that appear in the Born-Infeld action, amplifying nonlinear effects. Thus ``a'' is the dominant input into the force between heavy ions that we use to compute the scattering angle as a function of the impact parameter. We evaluate the Born-Infeld effects, showing relevance at small impact parameters and exhibiting their dependence on the value of the limiting field strength.

DOI:10.12693/APhysPolA.143.87 topics: Born-Infeld electromagnetism, heavy-ion collisions, strong fields