Next-to-leading order thermal photon production in a weakly-coupled plasma

Understand

We summarize the recent determination to next-to-leading order of the thermal photon rate at weak coupling.

• We emphasize how it can be expressed in terms of gauge-invariant condensates on the light cone, which are amenable to novel sum rules and Euclidean techniques.
• For the phenomenologically interesting value of alpha_s=0.3, the NLO correction represents a 20% increase and has a functional form similar to the LO result.