The polarization of thermal dileptons emitted in high-energy heavy-ion collisions
nucl-th2026-05v1license
Abstract
This work presents calculations of thermal dilepton emission and polarization observables. It features a comprehensive framework which comprises virtual photon spectral functions complete at next-to-leading-order in the strong coupling and iEBE-MUSIC hydrodynamic simulations. The polarization of thermal lepton pairs is shown to be sensitive to in-medium properties of the quark-gluon plasma. We consider Pb+Pb collisions performed in conditions specific to the LHC and examine the magnitude and behaviour of the polarization as measured in different frames, the effects of the pre-equilibrium gluon abundance, and we derive a one-to-one mapping between dielectron and dimuon polarization.
Comments: 17 pages, 14 figures
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30180,
title = {The polarization of thermal dileptons emitted in high-energy heavy-ion collisions},
author = {Han Gao and Xiang-Yu Wu and Charles Gale and Greg Jackson and Sangyong Jeon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30180},
year = {2026}
}