Darker and brighter branes: Suppression and enhancement of photon production in a strongly coupled magnetized plasma

TL;DR

This paper investigates how intense magnetic fields influence photon emission from a strongly coupled plasma using holographic methods, revealing suppression or enhancement effects and implications for experimental observations.

Contribution

It extends previous holographic models by allowing photon polarization states to vary, providing a more complete analysis of magnetic field effects on photon production.

Findings

Photon production increases with magnetic field up to a critical value B_θ.

Beyond B_θ, photon production decreases below the zero-field level.

Magnetic fields enhance elliptic flow, possibly explaining experimental excesses.

Abstract

We extend our holographic analysis of the emission of photons by a strongly coupled plasma subject to a very intense external magnetic field. We previously showed that in a particular model, any photon produced by the plasma had to be in its only polarization state parallel to the reaction plane. In this paper we consider a construction that relaxes a formerly imposed constraint, permitting the emission of photons with either out-plane or in-plane polarization. This constitutes a completion of our former study because the fully back-reacted equations decouple for these two polarization states in such a manner that those involving the in-plane are identical to the ones we explored previously. In view of the above, part of the details concerning the calculations and of the numerical results for the differential rate of emitted photons that we present here correspond exactly to those omitted in our preceding letter. One of our main results is that the production of photons is increased by the introduction of a non-vanishing magnetic field with an intensity up to a value $B_{\vartheta}$, above which the effect is reversed and said production becomes lower than the $B=0$ case. The characteristic intensity $B_{\vartheta}$ depends on the propagation direction and tends to zero as the photon momentum becomes aligned with the magnetic field. Additionally, we also show that the magnetic field has the effect of increasing the value of the elliptic flow, providing a possible explanation for the excess measured in collision experiments. The holographic model is constructed using an effective five-dimensional action that includes a scalar field in addition to the constant magnetic field.