At high energies a quark-gluon plasma is expected to be formed in heavy ion
collisions at RHIC and LHC. The theoretical description of these processes is
directly associated to a complete knowledge of the details of medium effects in
the nuclear gluon distribution. In this paper we analyze the possibility to
constraint the behavior of this distribution considering peripheral heavy ion
collisions. We reanalyze the photoproduction of heavy quarks for the deduction
of the in-medium gluon distribution using three current parameterizations for
this parton distribution. Moreover, we show that the elastic photoproduction of
vector mesons is a potential process to probe the nuclear gluon distribution.Comment: 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physicsl review
