Novel aspects of particle production in ultra-peripheral collisions

One of the hot topics in hadron physics is the study of the new exotic charmonium states and the determination of their internal structure. Another important topic is the study of the magnetic field produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and its effects on observables. In this note, we show that we can use ultra-peripheral collisions to address both topics. We compute the cross section for the production of the D⁺D⁻ molecular bound state in photon-photon collisions and also the cross section for π⁰ production in the target induced by the magnetic field of the projectile. Both cross sections are sizeable, and their measurement would be very useful to elucidate the above-mentioned questions.