Interpolation of hard and soft dilepton rates

Abstract

Strict next-to-leading order (NLO) results for the dilepton production rate from a QCD plasma at temperatures above a few hundred MeV suffer from a breakdown of the loop expansion in the regime of soft invariant masses M^2 << (pi T)^2. In this regime an LPM resummation is needed for obtaining the correct leading-order result. We show how to construct an interpolation between the hard NLO and the leading-order LPM expression. The final numerical results are presented in a tabulated form, suitable for insertion into hydrodynamical codes.