Pre-equilibrium photons from the early stages of heavy-ion collisions

Abstract:

We use QCD kinetic theory to compute photon production in the chemically equilibrating Quark-Gluon Plasma created in the early stages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We do a detailed comparison of pre-equilibrium photon rates to the thermal photon production. We show that the photon spectrum radiated from a hydrodynamic attractor evolution satisfies a simple scaling form in terms of the specific shear viscosity η/s and entropy density dS/dζ∼(Tτ1/3)3/2∞. We confirm the analytical predictions with numerical kinetic theory simulations. We use the extracted scaling function to compute the pre-equilibrium photon contribution in sNN−−−−√=2.76TeV 0-20\% PbPb collisions. We demonstrate that our matching procedure allows for a smooth switching from pre-equilibrium kinetic to thermal hydrodynamic photon production. Finally, our publicly available implementation can be straightforwardly added to existing heavy ion models.

O. Garcia-Montero, A. Mazeliauskas, P. Plaschke, S. Schlichting, „Pre-equilibrium photons from
the early stages of heavy-ion collisions“, 18. Aug. 2023, arXiv:2308.09747 (2023).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09747

Related to Project A01