English

Electromagnetic emission from strongly interacting hadronic and partonic matter created in heavy-ion collisions

Nuclear Theory 2025-05-29 v4 Nuclear Experiment

Abstract

We investigate dilepton production in heavy-ion, proton-proton, and proton-nucleus collisions from low energies of 1 AGeV (SIS) to ultra-relativistic energies (LHC) using the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. PHSD is a microscopic, non-equilibrium approach that integrates hadronic and partonic degrees of freedom, providing a comprehensive description of relativistic heavy-ion collisions from initial nucleon-nucleon interactions to quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formation, hadronization, and final-state interactions. Key dilepton sources in PHSD include hadronic decays, bremsstrahlung, QGP radiation (q+qˉe+eq+\bar q \to e^+e^-, \ q+qˉg+e+eq+\bar q \to g+ e^+e^-, \ q+gq+e+eq+g \to q+ e^+e^-), primary Drell-Yan production, and semileptonic decays of correlated charm and bottom pairs. PHSD well describes dilepton data from HADES, STAR, and ALICE experiments. We examine in-medium effects, such as the vector meson spectral function broadening, and present the excitation function for the dilepton "excess" in the invariant mass range 0.4<Mee<0.750.4<M_{ee}<0.75 GeV/c2^2. For the first time we report on the baryon chemical potential μB\mu_B-dependence of the QGP radiation calculated on a basis of the Dynamical-Quasi-Particle Model (DQPM) in PHSD. The influence of μB\mu_B on the QGP yield grows at lower collision energies, where μB\mu_B becomes large, however, its impact on the total dilepton spectra is small due to the lowering of the QGP volume with decreasing energy. The excitation function of QGP dileptons, is presented versus correlated charm, confirming that the QGP radiation overshines charm contributions at s2530\sqrt{s} \simeq 25-30 GeV in central Au+Au collisions, providing access to thermal QGP dileptons at BES RHIC and FAIR.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.05253,
  title  = {Electromagnetic emission from strongly interacting hadronic and partonic matter created in heavy-ion collisions},
  author = {Adrian William Romero Jorge and Taesoo Song and Qi Zhou and Elena Bratkovskaya},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05253},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

extended version (29 pages, 24 figures) to be published in Phys. Rev. C