Speaker
Anna Schäfer
(Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies)
Description
Photons play an important role in the investigation and understanding of the QGP. Unlike hadrons, which are likely to interact with the medium before detection, photons only interact electromagnetically, their mean free path is much larger than the size of the system. They are direct probes of the observed medium and offer unique insights into the fireball and the hadronic phase. Additionally, measurements at RHIC and LHC show unexpectedly large momentum anisotropies for photons presumably produced in the hadronic phase of heavy ion collisions. Further investigation of photons in a strongly-interacting medium is hence necessary to solve the direct photon flow puzzle.
To improve the theoretical understanding of photons in heavy ion reactions, scattering processes involving photons have been implemented into a hadronic transport approach (SMASH), which simulates hot and dense strongly-interacting nuclear matter. Comparisons of the obtained thermal rates in infinite matter calculations to theoretical predictions and to the ones used in hydrodynamic calculations will be shown. The plan for the future is to apply this hadronic transport approach within a hybrid approach to RHIC/LHC energies.
Primary author
Anna Schäfer
(Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies)
Co-authors
Prof.
Charles Gale
(McGill University, Montreal)
Prof.
Hannah Petersen
(Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies)
Dr
Juan M. Torres-Rincon
(Stony Brook University, New York)
Niklas Ehlert
(Goethe University, Frankfurt)
