Lepton pair production from a hot and dense QCD medium in the presence of an arbitrary magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how an external magnetic field influences lepton pair production in a hot, dense QCD medium, revealing enhanced production rates and new decay process contributions, with implications for understanding magnetic effects in such environments.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of lepton pair production considering arbitrary magnetic fields and includes magnetic catalysis effects, extending beyond previous zero-field or lowest Landau level approximations.

Findings

Significant enhancement of lepton pair production in magnetic fields.

Identification of additional decay process contributions.

Effects of magnetic catalysis and inverse catalysis on production rates.

Abstract

In this article, we have explored the very important quantity of lepton pair production from a hot and dense QCD medium in presence of an arbitrary external magnetic field for simultaneous nonzero values of both the parallel (along the direction of the external field) and perpendicular (lying on the transverse plane to the external field) components of the dilepton momentum. As opposed to the zero magnetic field case (the so-called Born rate) or the lowest Landau level approximated rate, where only the annihilation process contributes, here we observe contributions also arising out of the quark and antiquark decay processes. We found the encouraging result of considerable enhancement of lepton pair production in presence of an arbitrary magnetic field. We decompose the total rate into different physical processes and discuss their behaviors for both zero and nonzero baryon density. The whole analysis is then subjected to an effective model treatment, where we have incorporated the magnetic field induced novel effects of magnetic catalysis (MC) and inverse MC (IMC) through a medium dependent scalar coupling, which leads to some further interesting observations.