Abstract
Ultra-peripheral collisions occur when nuclei colliding with each other at high energies just miss each other, rendering negligible the short-range strong force but revealing their electromagnetic interaction. This interaction often results in the production of both mesons and lepton pairs, and has served as an important tool in probing the structure of the nucleus. Due to the need to analyze experimental data, a Monte-Carlo event generator named STARlight was created to simulate these interactions. This event generator, designed in 1995, has undergone several changes including a conversion from FORTRAN to C++. In this work, we have made further contributions to the development of this software. The pseudorapidity cuts functionality has now been extended to asymmetric collisions. A better parameterization for the normalization of the default nuclear density distribution for STARlight's simulation has been introduced. A better model for oxygen's nuclear distribution, the three-parameter Fermi model, was also implemented and the effect of the new implementation evaluated. Furthermore, the new HEPMC3 standard for writing event records has also been implemented in STARlight. An approach to handle the over-determined constraints on the four-momentum of intermediate and outgoing particles was introduced and the performance of this approach evaluated. In this work, we will discuss STARlight and the physics it models, after which we will discuss and evaluate each of the new contributions to the software.