High Energy Two-Photon Interactions at the LHC

Two-photon events at the LHC are characterized by the protons scattered at very small angles and the particles centrally produced via the photon-photon fusion. To select these events from the huge samples of generic pp interactions a detection of the scattered protons, or tagging two-photon interactions is necessary. It requires installation of the high-resolution position-sensitive detectors close to the proton beam and far from the interaction point. Efficient measurement of the forward-scattered protons will open a new field of studying high-energy photon-photon interactions at remarkable luminosity, reaching 1% of that in pp collisions. In this paper a few aspects of tagging two-photon interactions as well as several most exciting topics in the high-energy two-photon physics at the LHC are presented.

K. Piotrzkowski · 2002