PRODUCTION OF THERMAL PHOTONS IN VISCOUS FLUID DYNAMICS WITH TEMPERATURE-DEPENDENT SHEAR VISCOSITY

Abstract

We compute the spectrum of thermal photons created in Au+Au collisions at [Formula: see text], taking into account dissipative corrections in production processes corresponding to the quark–gluon plasma and hadronic phases. To describe the evolution of the fireball, we use a viscous fluid dynamic model with different parametrizations for the temperature-dependence of η/s. We find that the spectrum significantly depends on the values of η/s in the QGP phase, and is almost insensitive to the values in the hadronic phase. We also compare the influence of the temperature-dependence of η/s on the spectrum of thermal photons to that of using different equations of state in the fluid dynamic simulations, finding that both effects are of the same order of magnitude.