Photon Emission from Ultrarelativistic Plasmas

By P. Arnold, Guy D. Moore, Laurence G. Yaffe. 2001

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The emission rate of photons from a hot, weakly coupled ultrarelativistic plasma is analyzed. Leading-log results, reflecting the sensitivity of the emission rate to scattering events with momentum transfers from gT to T, have previously been obtained. But a complete leading-order treatment requires including collinearly enhanced, inelastic processes such as bremsstrahlung. These inelastic processes receive O(1) modifications from multiple scattering during the photon emission process, which limits the coherence length of the emitted radiation (the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect). We perform a diagrammatic analysis to identify, and sum, all leading-order contributions. We find that the leading-order photon emission rate is not sensitive to non-perturbative g2T scale dynamics. We derive an integral equation for the photon emission rate which is very similar to the result of Migdal in his original discussion of the LPM effect. The accurate solution of this integral equation for specific theories of interest will be reported in a companion paper.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/208c518d85025851b556703ea382c61432d99b88

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Citations in the corpus

Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma (2008, background): “2) We do not include the bremsstrahlung contribution which in an equilibrium plasma also contributes at leading order in the coupling constant due to enhancements from collinear photon radiation [89, 90, 91, 92].”
Jet quenching in high-energy heavy-ion collisions (2015, background): “(similar to DGLAP equations for PDFs). The scale dependence of twist-4 quark-gluon correlation function reads: @T qg(x B;0;0;2 f ) @ln2 f = s 2ˇ Z 1 x B dx x P qg!qg T qg+ P qg(^x)T gg(x;0;0;2f) ; (45) November 4, 2015 1:23 World Scientic Review Volume - 9.75in x 6.5in ws-rv975x65-jet Jet quenching ”
Photon emission from quark-gluon plasma: complete leading order results (2001, background): “[ 19 ]; it is related to one written down over 45 years ago by Migdal [17,18] for studying electromagnetic energy loss”
Transport coefficients in high temperature gauge theories. 2. Beyond leading log (2003, background): “For a complete discussion, and a derivation of the initial integral equation presented below, see refs. [22, 29 , 31].”
Thermal production of ultrarelativistic right-handed neutrinos: complete leading-order results (2012, background): “The equations (13) and (14) closely resemble those that are obtained for transverse and longitudinal photon production from a quark-gluon plasma [26, 27, 28] and can be solved numerically by using the same idea, namely to transform them via Fourier transformation into second-order ordinary different”
Medium-induced gluon branching (2012, unknown): “Further developments are presented in [13–20].”
Transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma (2011, background): “Denoting the spectral function of components μ and ν of the electromagnetic current by ρμν , the real photon emissivity of the quark-gluon plasma at temperature T is related to the vector spectral function through (see [55] and Refs.”
Advances in perturbative thermal field theory (2003, background): “Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal suppression†† of photon emission [425]. However, contrary to the conclusion arrived at in reference [426], thermal photon production from a QCD plasma was shown in reference [427] not to be sensitive to ultrasoft nonperturbative physics, and a complete leading-order evaluat”
Thermodynamics and instabilities of a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma (2011, background): “At weak coupling these have been calculated both in the absence [182, 183, 184] (see [185] for a review) and in the presence of anisotropy [186, 187, 188, 189].”
Photon and dilepton production in supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma (2006, background): “Leaving the detailed derivation to references [5, 31], the contribution from these processes to the current-current correlator boils down to”