Next-to-leading order thermal photon production in a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order correction to thermal photon production in a quark-gluon plasma, revealing a 20% increase at typical coupling strength and introducing new computational techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to compute NLO corrections using gauge invariant condensates and sum rules, applicable to other QCD calculations.

Findings

NLO correction increases photon production rate by 20% at alpha_s=0.3.

NLO contributions are expressed via gauge invariant condensates on the light cone.

The functional form of NLO correction resembles the leading order result.

Abstract

We compute the next-to-leading order O(g) correction to the thermal photon production rate in a QCD plasma. The NLO contributions can be expressed in terms of gauge invariant condensates on the light cone, which are amenable to novel sum rules and Euclidean techniques. We expect these technologies to be generalizable to other NLO calculations. For the phenomenologically interesting value of alpha_s=0.3, the NLO correction represents a 20% increase and has a functional form similar to the LO result.