Searching for True Muonium in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

We investigate the production of the as-yet-undetected true muonium within the quark-gluon plasma formed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, employing a relativistic Boltzmann transport framework coupled to viscous hydrodynamic simulations. The obtained effective cross sections for central collisions are 1. 23~ b in AuAu collisions with s ₍₍=200~GeV and 14. 2~ b in PbPb collisions with s ₍₍=5. 02~TeV, resulting in a yield of O (10⁴) and O (10⁵) true muonium per billion AA collisions at RHIC and the LHC, respectively. This establishes heavy-ion collisions as a promising process for detecting true muonium.