Photon Emission from a Parton Gas at Chemical Non-Equilibrium

Abstract

We compute the hard photon production rate of a chemically non-equilibrated quark-gluon plasma. We assume that the plasma is already thermally equilibrated, i.~e. describable by a temperature, but with a phase-space distribution that deviates from the Fermi/Bose distribution by a time dependent factor (fugacity). The photon spectrum is obtained by integrating the photon rate over the space-time evolution of the quark-gluon plasma. Some consequences for ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions are discussed.

17 pages, uuencoded Postscript file, figures included