2012/08/31 by Frank Michler, Hendrik van Hees, Dennis D. Dietrich +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Invariant mass #Particle physics #Phase transition #Photon #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum gravity #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Quark–gluon plasma #Thermal equilibrium #Thermal quantum field theory #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.aop.2013.05.021
published as Annals of Physics (2013), pp. 331-393 · 70 pages, 29 figures, added references
arxiv created 2012/09/10 · openalex publication_date 2013/06/13 · arxiv updated 2013/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In the early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions chiral symmetry is restored temporarily. During this so-called chiral phase transition, the quark masses change from their constituent to their bare values. This mass shift leads to the spontaneous non-perturbative creation of quark-antiquark pairs, which effectively contributes to the formation of the quark-gluon plasma. We investigate the photon production induced by this creation process. We provide an approach that eliminates possible unphysical contributions from the vacuum polarization and renders the resulting photon spectra integrable inthe ultraviolet domain. The off-equilibrium photon numbers are of quadratic order in the perturbative coupling constants while a thermal production is only of quartic order. Quantitatively, we find, however, that for the most physical mass-shift scenarios and for photon momenta larger than 1 GeV the off-equilibrium processes contribute less photons than the thermal processes.