Off-equilibrium photon production during the chiral phase transition

TL;DR

This paper investigates photon production during the chiral phase transition in heavy-ion collisions, highlighting the non-perturbative quark-antiquark pair creation and its relative contribution compared to thermal processes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to accurately compute off-equilibrium photon spectra during the chiral phase transition, avoiding unphysical vacuum polarization effects.

Findings

Off-equilibrium photon production is quadratic in coupling constants.

Thermal photon production is quartic in coupling constants.

For photon momenta > 1 GeV, thermal processes dominate over off-equilibrium ones.

Abstract

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.