The thermal dilepton rate at NLO at small and large invariant mass

Abstract

We report on a recent next-to-leading order perturbative determination of the dilepton rate from a hot QCD plasma for frequency and momentum of the order of the temperature and for much smaller invariant mass M∼gT. We briefly review the calculation, which generalizes the previous one for the photon case (M=0). We then analyze the consequences of the new calculation for the extraction of the photon rate from the small mass dilepton measurements. We then review a recent NLO determination at large M and we show how to match and merge its results with the low-mass ones, resulting in a single rate which is NLO-accurate over the phenomenologically relevant region.