Thermal photon production in Au+Au collisions: viscous corrections in two different hydrodynamic formalisms

TL;DR

This paper compares two hydrodynamic formalisms for calculating thermal photon spectra in Au+Au collisions, highlighting how differences in viscous corrections significantly affect the results and uncertainties in extracting shear viscosity.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of second-order and divergence-type hydrodynamics in modeling thermal photon production, emphasizing viscous correction impacts.

Findings

Divergence-type theory predicts higher photon spectra than second-order theory.

Viscous corrections are a major source of uncertainty in shear viscosity extraction.

Differences between hydrodynamic models surpass uncertainties from hadron elliptic flow data.

Abstract

We calculate the spectra of produced thermal photons in Au+Au collisions taking into account the nonequilibrium contribution to photon production due to finite shear viscosity. The evolution of the fireball is modeled by second-order as well as by divergence-type 2+1 dissipative hydrodynamics, both with an ideal equation of state and with one based on Lattice QCD that includes an analytical crossover. The spectrum calculated in the divergence-type theory is considerably enhanced with respect to the one calculated in the second-order theory, the difference being entirely due to differences in the viscous corrections to photon production. Our results show that the differences in hydrodynamic formalisms are an important source of uncertainty in the extraction of the value of $\eta/s$ from measured photon spectra. The uncertainty in the value of $\eta/s$ associated with different hydrodynamic models used to compute thermal photon spectra is larger than the one occurring in matching hadron elliptic flow to RHIC data.