Dileptons from the nonequilibrium quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

According to the dynamical quasiparticle model (DQPM) – matched to reproduce lattice QCD results in thermodynamic limit, – the constituents of the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma (sQGP) are massive and off-shell quasi-particles (quarks and gluons) with broad spectral functions. In order to address the electromagnetic radiation of the sQGP, we derive off-shell cross sections of qq̄ → γ*, qq̄ → γ* + g and qg → γ* q(q̄g → γ*q̄) reactions taking into account the effective propagators for quarks and gluons from the DQPM. Dilepton production in In+In collisions at 158 AGeV is studied by implementing these processes into the parton-hadron-string dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. The microscopic PHSD transport approach describes the full evolution of the heavy-ion collision: from the dynamics of quasi-particles in the sQGP phase (when the local energy density is above ~ 1 GeV/fm) through hadronization and to the following hadron interactions and off-shell propagation after the hadronization. A comparison to the data of the NA60 Collaboration shows that the low mass dilepton spectra are well described by including a collisional broadening of vector mesons, while the spectra in the intermediate mass range are dominated by off-shell quark-antiquark annihilation, quark Bremsstrahlung and gluon-Compton scattering in the nonperturbative QGP. In particular, the observed softening of the mT spectra at intermediate masses (1 GeV ≤ M ≤ 3 GeV) is approximately reproduced.