Photon Production from a Quark--Gluon Plasma

Abstract

In-medium interactions of a particle in a hot plasma are considered in the framework of thermal field theory. The formalism to calculate gauge invariant rates for photon and dilepton production from the medium is given. In the application to a QED plasma, astrophysical consequences are pointed out. The photon production rate from strongly interacting quarks in the quark--gluon plasma, which might be formed in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, is calculated in the previously unaccessible regime of photon energies of the order of the plasma temperature. For temperatures below the chiral phase transition, an effective field theory incorporating dynamical chiral symmetry breaking is employed, and perturbative QCD at higher temperatures. A smooth transition between both regions is obtained. The relevance to the soft photon problem and to high energy heavy ion experiments is discussed.

Paper in ReVTeX. Figures and complete paper available via anonymous ftp, ftp://tpri6c.gsi.de/pub/phenning/hq95gam

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Evidence for an Excess of Soft Photons in Hadronic Decays of Z^0
• Study of the Dependence of Direct Soft Photon Production on the Jet Characteristics in Hadronic Z^0 Decays
• Enhanced photon production rate on the light--cone
• Approximate spectral functions in thermal field theory
• Kinetic Theory of Radiation in Nonequilibrium Relativistic Plasmas