Elliptic flow from thermal photons with magnetic field in holography

Understand

We compute the elliptic flow $v_2$ of thermal photons in a strongly coupled plasma with constant magnetic field via gauge/gravity duality.

• The D3/D7 embedding is applied to generate the contributions from massive quarks.
• By considering the cases in 2+1 flavor SYM analogous to the photon production in QGP, we obtain the thermal-photon $v_2$, which is qualitatively consistent with the direct-photon $v_2$ measured in RHIC at intermediate energy.
• However, due to the simplified setup, the thermal-photon $v_2$ in our model should be regarded as the upper bound for the $v_2$ generated by solely magnetic field in the strongly coupled scenario.