English

Electromagnetic tomography of radial flow in the quark-gluon plasma

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-03-13 v2 Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We present a novel multimessenger approach to extract the effective radial flow of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by jointly analyzing thermal photon and dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions. A key feature of this method is that it circumvents the need for a directly unmeasurable reference -- the photon temperature in the absence of flow -- by establishing, within a calibrated model framework, a stable, approximately linear correlation with the dilepton-inferred temperature. This construction defines an experimentally constructible quantity, vreffv_r^\mathrm{eff}, which reflects early-time collectivity and exhibits a strong correlation with the spacetime-averaged radial velocity of the QGP. Together with previous results linking dilepton slopes to the initial QGP temperature, our work establishes a consistent framework for electromagnetic tomography of the QGP. Our framework quantifies the experimental precision target, thereby providing a concrete roadmap for future measurements at RHIC and the LHC and opening a new avenue to probe the early-time dynamics of hot QCD matter.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.20752,
  title  = {Electromagnetic tomography of radial flow in the quark-gluon plasma},
  author = {Lipei Du and Ulrich Heinz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20752},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v1: 10 pages, 5 figures; v2: Expanded the discussion on the LHC and anisotropic flow; results remain unchanged. Accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett