https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20159700011
Dilepton production from RHIC to the LHC
Excellence Cluster Universe, Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany
a e-mail: torsten.dahms@cern.ch
Published online: 22 June 2015
The goal of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC is to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a phase of matter with partonic degrees of freedom. Electromagnetic radiation, in form of photons or lepton pairs, is a penetrating probe that allows the investigation of the full time evolution and dynamics of the produced matter as it does not undergo strong interaction in the final state. The dilepton spectrum is extremely rich in physics sources: Thermal black-body radiation is of particular interest as it carries information about the QGP temperature. Modifications of the spectral functions of light vector mesons are linked to the potential restoration of chiral symmetry in the QGP phase. Correlated lepton pairs from semi-leptonic charm and beauty decays provide additional information about the heavy-quark energy loss. Finally, the suppression of quarkonia in the QGP give access to an independent temperature measurement. In this proceedings, dilepton results from RHIC are reviewed and the status as well as prospects of low-mass dilepton measurements at the LHC are given.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
