Nonequilibrium photon production in partonic transport simulations

TL;DR

This paper implements leading-order photon production in nonequilibrium partonic transport simulations, showing how microscopic scatterings and modified screening reproduce known rates, with results indicating nonequilibrium effects significantly influence photon spectra and flow.

Contribution

It introduces a method to accurately simulate photon production in nonequilibrium quark-gluon plasma using BAMPS, incorporating exact matrix elements and modified screening effects.

Findings

Photon spectra are harder due to nonequilibrium effects.

Photon elliptic flow can become negative in this framework.

Yield is lower due to slow quark chemical equilibration.

Abstract

We discuss the implementation of leading-order photon production in nonequilibrium partonic transport simulations. In this framework photons are produced by microscopic scatterings, where we include the exact matrix elements of Compton scattering, quark-antiquark annihilation, and bremsstrahlung processes. We show how the hard-thermal loop inspired screening of propagators has to be modified such that the microscopic production rate agrees well with the analytically known resummed leading-order rate. We model the complete quark-gluon plasma phase of heavy-ion collisions by using the partonic transport approach called the Boltzmann approach to multiparton scatterings (BAMPS), which solves the ultrarelativistic Boltzmann equation with Monte Carlo methods. We show photon spectra and elliptic flow of photons from BAMPS and discuss nonequilibrium effects. Due to the slow quark chemical equilibration in BAMPS, the yield is lower than the results from other groups; in turn we see a strong effect from scatterings of energetic jet-like partons with the medium. This nonequilibrium photon production can dominate the thermal emission, such that the spectra are harder and the photonic elliptic flow of the quark-gluon plasma becomes negative.