Inclusive meson production in peripheral collisions of ultrarelativistic heavy ions

There exist several proposals to use Weizsacker-Williams photons generated by ultrarelativistic heavy ions to produce exotic particles in gamma gamma fusion reactions. To estimate the background conditions for such reactions we analyze various mechanisms of meson production in very peripheral collis ions of ultrarelativistic heavy ions at RHIC and LHC energies. Besides the gamma gamma fusion they include also electromagnetic gammaA interactions an d strong nucleon-nucleon interactions in grazing AA collisions. All these p rocesses are characterised by low multiplicities of produced particles. The gammaA and AA events are simulated by corresponding Monte Carlo codes, REL DIS and FRITIOF. In each of these processes a certain fraction of pions is produced close to the mid-rapidity region that gives a background for the g amma gamma events. The possibility of selecting the mesons produced in the gamma gamma fusion events via different p(t) cut procedures is demonstrated .