The spectral reconstruction problem for thermal photon and dilepton rates

TL;DR

This paper discusses recent progress in reconstructing thermal photon and dilepton spectral functions from lattice QCD data, which are crucial for understanding the quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It presents new methods and results for spectral reconstruction of thermal rates from lattice QCD, advancing the indirect determination of photon production rates.

Findings

Improved spectral reconstruction techniques developed.

Successful extraction of photon production rates from lattice data.

Enhanced understanding of QCD at high temperatures.

Abstract

Thermal photon and dilepton rates are important probes for understanding the quark-gluon plasma and QCD at high temperatures. As a consequence there is a strong interest to determine them using lattice QCD calculations. However, this is made difficult as they are related to thermal spectral functions that are not directly accessible through lattice calculations. Instead they are indirectly obtainable through performing an inverse Laplace-type transformation of Euclidean time lattice correlation functions. In this talk we will present recent results in dynamical QCD with a focus on advancements in determining the photon production rate via spectral reconstruction from lattice data.