A Tale of Tails: Photon Rates and Flow in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

We consider the possibility that quark and gluon distributions in the medium created in high energy heavy ion collisions may be modified by a power law tail at energies much higher than the temperature. We parametrize such a tail by Tsallis distributions with an exponent motivated by phenomenology. These distributions are characterized by an effective temperature scale that we assume to evolve in time like the temperature for thermal distributions. We find that including such a tail increases the rates for photon production and significantly delays the emission times for photons of a fixed energy. We argue that these effects are sufficiently large that they should be able to account for photon yields and flow patterns seen in LHC and RHIC experiments.

18 pages, 6 figures, references added and corrected

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Cited by in corpus (28)

• The production of photons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Azimuthally anisotropic emission of low-momentum direct photons in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}=200$ GeV
• Parametric estimate of the relative photon yields from the Glasma and the Quark-Gluon Plasma in heavy-ion collisions
• Direct photon elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV
• Beam-energy and centrality dependence of direct-photon emission from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Ellipticity of photon emission from strongly magnetized hot QCD plasma
• Thermal photon radiation in high multiplicity p+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
• Prompt photon yield and elliptic flow from gluon fusion induced by magnetic fields in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Holographic Photon Production in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Holography for Heavy Ions Collisions at LHC and NICA
• Photon production and elliptic flow from momentum-anisotropic quark-gluon plasma
• Benchmarking a Non-Equilibrium Approach to Photon Emission in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Prompt, pre-equilibrium, and thermal photons in relativistic nuclear collisions
• Anisotropic flow of thermal photons at RHIC and LHC
• Spectra and elliptic flow of thermal photons from full overlap U+U collisions at RHIC
• Photon production from Pb+Pb collisions at {$\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$} = 5.02 TeV at LHC and at {$\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$} = 39 TeV at FCC
• Comparison of Tsallis statistics with the Tsallis-factorized statistics in the ultrarelativistic $pp$ collisions
• Impact of laser polarization on q-exponential photon tails in non-linear Compton scattering
• QCD equation of state with Tsallis statistics for heavy-ion collisions
• Recent developments in the theory of electromagnetic probes in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Direct Photons in Hydrodynamic Modeling of Relativistic Nuclear Collisions
• Scaling properties of direct photon yields in heavy ion collisions
• Geometrical scaling of prompt photons in heavy ion collisions
• Photon and dilepton emission anisotropy for a magnetized quark-gluon plasma
• Impact of residual contamination on inclusive and direct photon flow
• Hydrodynamic model of heavy-ion collisions with low momentum components
• Geometrical Scaling of Direct Photons in Relativistic Heavy Ion and d+Au Collisions
• Prompt photon yield and $v_2$ coefficient from gluon fusion induced by magnetic field in heavy-ion collision