Exclusive production of lepton, quark and meson pairs in peripheral ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions

The cross section for exclusive heavy quark and heavy antiquark pair (QQ¯) production in heavy ion collisions is calculated for the LHC energy SNN=5.5TeV. Here we consider only processes with photon-photon interactions and omit diffractive contributions. We include both QQ¯, QQ¯g and QQ¯qq¯ final states as well as photon single-resolved components. The different components give contributions of the same order of magnitude to the nuclear cross section. The cross sections found here are smaller than those for the diffractive photon-pomeron mechanism and larger than diffractive pomeron-pomeron discussed in the literature.