Open Access

Exclusive photon-fusion production of even-spin resonances and exotic QED atoms in high-energy hadron collisions

David d’Enterria ^1,* and Karen Kang ^2,†

¹CERN, EP Department, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
²Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002, USA

^*Contact author: david.d’enterria@cern.ch
^†Contact author: kkang25@amherst.edu

Phys. Rev. D 112, 116022 – Published 30 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rnxl-v6gd

Abstract

The cross sections for the single exclusive production of (pseudo)scalar and (pseudo)tensor hadrons, as well as of even-spin QED bound states formed by pairs of opposite-charge leptons or hadrons, are estimated for photon-fusion processes in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of proton-proton, proton-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Future Circular Collider, as well as in proton-air interactions at the highest energies reached by cosmic rays impinging on Earth. The UPC cross sections are computed in the equivalent photon approximation with realistic photon fluxes from the charged form factors of proton, lead, gold, and nitrogen ions. The production of four types of even-spin systems are considered: quarkonium (spin-0, 2, 4 meson bound states, from the lightest $π^{0}$ meson up to toponium), exotic hadrons (including candidate multiquark states), leptonium (positronium, dimuonium, and ditauonium), as well as mesonium (pionium, kaonium, D-onium, and B-onium) and baryonium (notably, protonium) QED atoms. The expected yields at the different colliders are presented for about 50 such even-spin composite resonances, for which the ALICE and LHCb experiments have potential reconstruction capabilities at the LHC. The impact of the diphoton decays of such even-spin states is also discussed as resonant backgrounds in the measurement of light-by-light scattering ( $γ γ \to γ γ$ ) over $m_{γ γ} \approx 0.1 - 15$ -GeV masses in Pb-Pb UPCs at the LHC.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 116022– Published 30 December, 2025

Vol. 112, Iss. 11 — 1 December 2025

Received 3 June 2025
Accepted 28 August 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rnxl-v6gd

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

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Exclusive photon-fusion production of even-spin resonances and exotic QED atoms in high-energy hadron collisions

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