Excess Dileptons in High-Energy Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

It has been observed recently that while continuum dilepton production and open charm production in high-energy $pA$ collisions can be described in terms of the superposition of $pp$ collisions, dilepton yields in S+U collisions are in excess of similar extrapolations. This feature can be explained as arising from the interaction of gluons produced in different soft baryon-baryon collisions, leading to additional open-charm pairs in nucleus-nucleus collisions but not in $pA$ collisions.