Precision luminosity measurement at LHC using two-photon production of mu^+ mu^- pairs

Abstract

The application of the two-photon process pp -> pp + mu^+mu^- for the luminosity measurements at LHC with the ATLAS detector is considered. The expected accuracy of the absolute offline luminosity determination is 1 - 2 % for the luminosity range of 10^{33} - 10^{34} cm^-2 s^-1. The preliminary cross section estimates done for LHCb promise the same level of the luminosity measurement accuracy at L = 2 x 10^{32} cm^-2 s^-1.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, 5 figures (9 .eps files). Talk at the VIII Intern. Conference on Instrumentation for Colliding Beam Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia, Feb.28 - March 6, 2002, be published in Nucl. Instrum. and Methods