Speaker
Description
Thermal dileptons serve as ideal probes for studying the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in heavy-ion collisions. In particular, the dilepton production rate is directly proportional to the in-medium spectral function of the electromagnetic current, so that the invariant-mass spectra of dileptons encode both the temperature evolution and the microscopic structure of the medium. In this work, the thermal dilepton production rate in the QGP at next-to-leading order (NLO) is computed from a purely kinetic scattering point of view, offering a transparent physical picture of the production mechanism. We consistently account for both the real processes and the one-loop virtual corrections at NLO; for the latter, the contributions to the thermal rate are evaluated using a "cut to the end" method, which converts the one-loop diagram into 3-to-2 tree-level scattering processes. We examine dileptons that are either at rest or moving with respect to the medium, and demonstrate the cancellation of infrared divergences between the real processes and the virtual corrections in both kinematic regimes [1].
References
[1] S. Zhao and M. He, Thermal dilepton production at next-to-leading order in the quark-gluon plasma, work in preparation for submission, arXiv: 2608.XXXXX
