Production of thermal photons in viscous fluid dynamics with temperature-dependent shear viscosity

Abstract

We compute the spectrum of thermal photons created in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV, taking into account dissipative corrections in production processes corresponding to the quark--gluon plasma and hadronic phases. To describe the evolution of the fireball we use a viscous fluid dynamic model with different parametrizations for the temperature--dependence of $\eta /s$. We find that the spectrum significantly depends on the values of $\eta /s$ in the QGP phase, and is almost insensitive to the values in the hadronic phase. We also compare the influence of the temperature--dependence of $\eta /s$ on the spectrum of thermal photons to that of using different equations of state in the fluid dynamic simulations, finding that both effects are of the same order of magnitude.

Comments: 16 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Mod. Phys. Lett. A