Born-Infeld Nonlinear Electromagnetism in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

We study the effect of the limiting field strength of Born-Infeld electromagnetism on the dynamics of charged particle scattering. We formulate the Born-Infeld limiting field in an invariant manner, showing that it is the electric field-dominated eigenvalue “a” of the field tensor F^µν which is limited rather than the individual field vectors. Heavy ion collisions in particular provide uniquely large values of the field invariants that appear in the Born-Infeld action, amplifying nonlinear effects. Thus “a” is the dominant input into the force between heavy ions that we use to compute the scattering angle as a function of the impact parameter. We evaluate the Born-Infeld effects, showing relevance at small impact parameters and exhibiting their dependence on the value of the limiting field strength.