PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea Alvarez Piqueras, D Aparisi Pozo, JA Bailey, AJ Barranco Navarro, L Cabrera Urban, S Castillo, FL Castillo Gimenez, V Cerda Alberich, L Costa, MJ Escobar, C Estrada Pastor, O Ferrer, A Fiorini, L Fullana Torregrosa, E Fuster, J Garcia, C Garcia Navarro, JE Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Gonzalvo Rodriguez, GR Higon-Rodriguez, E Lacasta, C Lozano Bahilo, JJ Madaffari, D Mamuzic, J Marti-Garcia, S Melini, D MiƱano, M Mitsou, VA Rodriguez Bosca, S Rodriguez Rodriguez, D Ruiz-Martinez, A Salt, J Santra, A Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Valero, A Valls Ferrer, JA Vos, M TI Observation of Light-by-Light Scattering in Ultraperipheral Pb plus Pb Collisions with the ATLAS Detector SO Physical Review Letters JI Phys. Rev. Lett. PY 2019 BP 052001 EP 21pp VL 123 IS 5 DI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.052001 LA English AB This Letter describes the observation of the light-by-light scattering process, gamma gamma -> gamma gamma, in Pb + Pb collisions at root S-NN = 5.02 TeV. The analysis is conducted using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.73 nb(-1), collected in November 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Light-by-light scattering candidates are selected in events with two photons produced exclusively, each with transverse energy E-T(gamma) > 3 GeV and pseudorapidity vertical bar eta(gamma)vertical bar < 2.4, diphoton invariant mass above 6 GeV, and small diphoton transverse momentum and acoplanarity. After applying all selection criteria, 59 candidate events are observed for a background expectation of 12 +/- 3 events. The observed excess of events over the expected background has a significance of 8.2 standard deviations. The measured fiducial cross section is 78 +/- 13(stat) +/- 7(syst) +/- 3(lumi) nb. ER