Time: 10:00 am, May 17, Wednesday, 2017  

Location: Room 9409  

Speaker: Dr. Marco Ruggieri, College of Physics of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences  

Title: Photons from the Early Stages of Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions  

Abstract: We present results about photons production in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The main novelty of our study is the calculation of the contribution of the early stage photons to the photon spectrum. The initial stage is modeled by an ensemble of classical gluon fields which decay to a quark-gluon plasma via the Schwinger mechanism, and the evolution of the system is studied by coupling classical field equations to relativistic kinetic theory; photons production is then computed by including the pertinent collision processes into the collision integral. We find that the contribution of early stage photons to the direct photon spectrum is substantial in the transverse momentum region $p_T\gtrsim 1.5$ GeV: therefore we identify this part of the photon spectrum as the sign of the early stage. Moreover, the amount of photons produced during the early stage is not negligible with respect to those produced by a thermalized quark-gluon plasma: we support the idea that there is no dark age in relativistic heavy ion collisions.