Incoherent $ρ$ meson photoproduction in ultraperipheral nuclear collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Using the Gribov-Glauber model for photon-nucleus scattering and a generalization of the vector meson dominance model for the hadronic structure of the photon, we make predictions for the cross section of incoherent ρ photoproduction in Pb-Pb ultraperipheral collisions in the Large Hadron Collider kinematics. We find that the effect of the inelastic nuclear shadowing is significant and leads to an additional 25% suppression of the incoherent cross section. Comparing our predictions to those of the STARlight Monte Carlo framework, we observe very significant differences.