Energetic di-leptons from the Quark Gluon Plasma

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production rates of energetic di-leptons from the Quark Gluon Plasma, using analytical and numerical methods within the hard thermal loop framework, and compares results with previous studies.

Contribution

It provides a systematic calculation of di-lepton production rates including both 2→2 processes and thermal Drell-Yan mechanisms, with new analytic and numerical results.

Findings

Logarithmic terms are obtained analytically.

Results are insensitive to photon mass when it is comparable to thermal quark mass.

Comparison with previous calculations shows consistency and improvements.

Abstract

In this paper we study the production of energetic di-leptons. We calculate the rate for 2 $\to$ 2 processes. The log term is obtained analytically and the constant term is calculated numerically. When the photon mass is of the order of the thermal quark mass, the result is insensitive to the photon mass and the soft logarithmic divergence is regulated by the thermal quark mass, exactly as in the case of real photons. We also consider the production of thermal Drell-Yan dileptons (thermal quark and antiquark pairs produced by virtual photons) and calculate the rate systematically in the context of the hard thermal loop effective theory. We obtain analytic and numerical results. We compare our results with those of previous calculations.