https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201714102007
Thermal photons from gluon fusion with magnetic fields
1 Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado Postal 70-543, México Distrito Federal 04510, Mexico
2 Centre for Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, and Department of Physics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa
a e-mail: ayala@nucleares.unam.mx
b e-mail: jorge.castano@correo.nucleares.unam.mx
c e-mail: cesareo.dominguez@uct.ac.za
d e-mail: HRNLUI001@myuct.ac.za
Published online: 12 April 2017
We compute the production of thermal photons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions by gluon fusion in the presence of an intense magnetic field, and during the early stages of the reaction. This photon yield is an excess over calculations that do not consider magnetic field effects. We add this excess to recent hydrodynamic calculations that are close to describing the experimental transverse momentum distribution in RHIC and LHC. We then show that with reasonable values for the temperature, magnetic field strength, and strong coupling constant, our results provide a very good description of such excess. These results support the idea that the origin of at least some of the photon excess observed in heavy-ion experiments may arise from magnetic field induced processes.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
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.
