English

Dilepton Production in a Rotating Thermal Medium: The Rigid Rotation Approximation

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-04-03 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We investigate dilepton production in a thermalized quark--gluon plasma subject to global rotation, in the rigid rotating approximation. We consider a generic process involving quark-antiquark annihilation followed by the emission of a highly energetic virtual photon decaying into a dilepton pair. For this process, we compute the dilepton emission rate from the imaginary part of the photon polarization tensor, at finite temperature and vorticity. Our results show that vorticity induces characteristic modifications in the light dilepton channel, namely ee+e^-e^+ production, where the emission spectrum exhibits a suppression at low transverse mass together with a mild shift of the production threshold. This behavior originates from the role of vorticity as an effective spin-dependent chemical potential that alters the available phase-space distribution for the emission process. In contrast, the μμ+\mu^-\mu^+ channel is {\color{red}more weakly affected by} the rotational background, thus remaining dominated by its intrinsic mass threshold. The resulting channel dependence highlights a potential phenomenological handle for disentangling rotational effects in heavy-ion collisions: while light dilepton spectra encode the imprints of vorticity in the infrared sector, the muon channel provides a comparatively robust baseline.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.18219,
  title  = {Dilepton Production in a Rotating Thermal Medium: The Rigid Rotation Approximation},
  author = {Jorge David Castaño-Yepes and Enrique Muñoz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.18219},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages, 5 figures. This version includes improvements to the calculations, figures, and discussion

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:50:34.899Z