The Magneto-Sono-Luminescence and its signatures in photon and dilepton production in heavy ion collisions

Understand

The matter produced in the early stages of heavy ion collisions consists mostly of gluons, and is penetrated by coherent magnetic field produced by spectator nucleons.

• The fluctuations of gluonic matter in an external magnetic field couple to real and virtual photons through virtual quark loops.
• We study the resulting contributions to photon and dilepton production that stem from the fluctuations of the stress tensor $T_{\mu\nu}$ in the background of a coherent magnetic field $\vec{B}$.
• Our study extends significantly the earlier work by two of us and Skokov, in which only the fluctuations of the trace of the stress tensor $T_{\mu\mu}$ were considered (the coupling of $T_{\mu\mu}$ to electromagnetic fields is governed by the scale anomaly).