Lattice QCD estimate of the quark-gluon plasma photon emission rate

Abstract

We present a computation of the photon emission rate of the quark-gluon plasma from two-flavor lattice QCD at a temperature of 254 MeV, which follows up on the work presented in [1]. We perform a continuum extrapolation of the vector-current correlator, and consider a linear combination of the Lorentz indices corresponding to a UV-finite spectral function. To extract the spectral function from the lattice correlators, an ill-posed inverse problem, we model the spectral function with a Padé ansatz. We further constrain our analysis by simultaneously fitting data with different momenta. We present results for a multi-momentum fit including the three smallest momenta available from our lattice analysis.