1997/05/13 by P. Rehberg, Peter Rehberg, Yu. L. Kalinovsky +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Theoretical and Computational Physics #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0375-9474(97)82592-4
published as Nucl.Phys. A622 (1997) 478-496 · 23 Pages Revtex, 6 Postscript Figures
arxiv created 1997/05/13 · openalex publication_date 1997/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
At the Mott transition of a quark/meson plasma, mesons become unbound. This leads to the effect of critical scattering, which is studied by investigating photon pair production due to the process q q→γγ. This process can proceed either via direct annihilation or via the formation of a mesonic resonance. It is shown that the latter channel leads to an enhancement of photon pairs with invariant mass equal to the thermal pion mass. The size of this effect measures the time the temperature stays near the Mott temperature during the evolution. It is particularly pronounced for a first order phase transition. The π0→γγ decay gives a strong background contribution and may make the observation of critical scattering in two-photon spectra of present day heavy ion collision experiments difficult.