A Tale of Tails: Photon Rates and Flow in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

We consider the possibility that quark and gluon distributions in the medium created in high energy heavy ion collisions may be modified by a power law tail at energies much higher than the temperature.

• We parametrize such a tail by Tsallis distributions with an exponent motivated by phenomenology.
• These distributions are characterized by an effective temperature scale that we assume to evolve in time like the temperature for thermal distributions.
• We find that including such a tail increases the rates for photon production and significantly delays the emission times for photons of a fixed energy.