Roman Pots in d-Au ultra-peripheral collisions at STAR

Udara Abeysekara
Department of Physics
Creighton University

Roman pots are newly installed detectors for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. These detectors have been previously used in the pp2pp experiment to study proton elastic scattering. The acceptance of deuterons scattered into the Roman pots detectors in ultra-peripheral d-Au interactions has been studied. Preliminary simulations using the starlite Monte Carlo suggest a small acceptance for scattered deuterons in ultra-peripheral collisions where rhos are produced. The momenta of the interacting virtual photon and pomeron of heavy ion ultra-peripheral collisions are directly related to the scattering angle of the nuclei. This could potentially permit a subsequent study of the relation between the energy of the interacting virtual photon and the rho production. This also permits a study of the parton distribution function of deuteron.