[Submitted on 18 Aug 2023] (cross-list from hep-ph)
Pre-equilibrium photons from the early stages of heavy-ion collisions
Oscar Garcia-Montero🇩🇪 · Aleksas Mazeliauskas🇩🇪 · Philip Plaschke🇩🇪 · Sören Schlichting🇩🇪
We use QCD kinetic theory to compute photon production in the chemically equilibrating Quark-Gluon Plasma created in the early stages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We do a detailed comparison of pre-equilibrium photon rates to the thermal photon production. We show that the photon spectrum radiated from a hydrodynamic attractor evolution satisfies a simple scaling form in terms of the specific shear viscosity and entropy density . We confirm the analytical predictions with numerical kinetic theory simulations. We use the extracted scaling function to compute the pre-equilibrium photon contribution in 0-20\% PbPb collisions. We demonstrate that our matching procedure allows for a smooth switching from pre-equilibrium kinetic to thermal hydrodynamic photon production. Finally, our publicly available implementation can be straightforwardly added to existing heavy ion models.
- Comments:
- 19 pages, 12 figures
- Subjects:
- High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
- arXiv:
- 2308.09747 [pdf]