Heavy ion cross sections totaling several hundred barns have been calculated previously for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These total cross sections are more than an order of magnitude larger than the geometric ion-ion cross sections primarily due to bound-free pair production (BFPP) and electromagnetic dissociation (EMD). Apart from a general interest in verifying the calculations experimentally, an accurate prediction of the losses created in the heavy ion collisions is of practical interest for the LHC, where some collision products are lost in cryogenically cooled magnets and have the potential to quench these magnets. In the 2012 RHIC run uranium ions collided with each other at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=192.8$ GeV with nearly all beam losses due to collisions. This allows for the measurement of the total cross section, which agrees with the calculated cross section within the experimental error.

• Received 12 July 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.89.014906