Heavy Quarks and Meson Production in Ultraperipheral Heavy Ion Collisions

In the last years, there has been a lot of interest in the description of electron-nucleus collisions at high energies. The results of current analysis show that future electronnucleus colliders at HERA and RHIC, probably could determine whether parton distributions saturate and constraint the behavior of the nuclear gluon distribution in the full kinematical range . However, until these colliders become reality we need to consider alternative searches in the current and/or scheduled accelerators which allow us to constraint the QCD dynamics. In this contribution, we summarize our investigations in Refs. 3,4 about the possibility of using ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions (UPC’s) as a photonuclear collider and study the heavy quark and vector meson production assuming distinct approaches for the QCD evolution. In heavy ion collisions the large number of photons coming from one of the colliding nuclei will allow to study photoproduction, with energies WγA reaching to 950 GeV for the LHC. The photonuclear cross sections are given by the convolution between the photon flux from one of the nuclei and the cross section for the scattering photon-nuclei. The expression for the production of a given final state Y