Dileptons from hot heavy static photons

Abstract

We compute the production rate of lepton pair by static photons at finite temperature at two-loop order. We treat the infrared region of the gluon phase space carefully by using a hard thermal loop gluon propagator. The result is free of infrared and collinear divergences and exhibits an enhancement which produces a result of order $\sim e^2{g}^3$ instead of $\sim e^2{g}^4$ as would be expected from ordinary perturbation theory.

14 pages, 2 figures