Energetic dileptons from the quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

In this paper we study the production of energetic dileptons. We calculate the rate for $2\ensuremath{\rightarrow}2$ processes. The log term is obtained analytically and the constant term is calculated numerically. When the photon mass is of the order of the thermal quark mass, the result is insensitive to the photon mass and the soft logarithmic divergence is regulated by the thermal quark mass, exactly as in the case of real photons. We also consider the production of thermal Drell-Yan dileptons (thermal quark and antiquark pairs annihilating into virtual photons) and calculate the rate systematically in the context of the hard thermal loop effective theory. We obtain analytic and numerical results. We compare our results with those of previous calculations.