Low Mass Thermal Dilepton Production at NLO in a Weakly Coupled Quark-Gluon Plasma

Understand

We present a computation, within weakly-coupled thermal QCD, of the production rate of low invariant mass ($M^2 \sim g^2 T^2$) dileptons, at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the coupling (which is $O(g^3 e^2 T^2)$).

• This involves extending the NLO calculation of the photon rate which we recently presented to the case of small nonzero photon invariant mass.
• Numerical results are discussed and tabulated forms and code are provided for inclusion in hydrodynamical models.
• We find that NLO corrections can increase the dilepton rate by up to 30-40% relative to leading order.