Next-to-leading order thermal photon production in a weakly-coupled plasma

Abstract

We summarize the recent determination to next-to-leading order of the thermal photon rate at weak coupling. We emphasize how it can be expressed in terms of gauge-invariant condensates on the light cone, which are amenable to novel sum rules and Euclidean techniques. For the phenomenologically interesting value of alpha_s=0.3, the NLO correction represents a 20% increase and has a functional form similar to the LO result.

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures. Invited plenary talk at Hard Probes 2013, Stellenbosch, South Africa, Nov. 4-8, 2013. To appear in the conference proceedings by Nuclear Physics A