Thermal photonv2with slow quark chemical equilibration

Abstract

Elliptic flow of direct photons in high-energy heavy-ion collisions has been a topic of great interest since it was experimentally found to be larger than most hydrodynamic expectations. I discuss the implication of possible late formation of the quark component in a hot QCD medium on the photon elliptic flow, because quarks are the source of thermal photons in the deconfined phase. Hydrodynamic equations are numerically solved with the evolution equations for quark and gluon number densities. The numerical results suggest that thermal photon ${v}_{2}$ is visibly enhanced by the slow chemical equilibration of quarks and gluons, reducing the aforementioned problem.