Electromagnetic measurement of the temperature of quark-gluon plasma produced in central ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions

Abstract

Ultrarelativistic collisions of large nuclei produce a short-lived plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. Of all the GeV-energy photons detected in these nuclear collisions, only a small number are emitted directly by the quark-gluon plasma. We use the characteristic near-exponential energy spectrum of these photons to estimate the maximum temperature of the plasma, assuming it undergoes hydrodynamic expansion. We quantify non-exponential corrections to the photon spectrum resulting from the characteristic equation of state and photon emission rate of nuclear matter.