The polarization of thermal dileptons emitted in high-energy heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

This work presents calculations of thermal dilepton emission and polarization observables. It features a comprehensive framework which comprises virtual photon spectral functions complete at next-to-leading-order in the strong coupling and iEBE-MUSIC hydrodynamic simulations. The polarization of thermal lepton pairs is shown to be sensitive to in-medium properties of the quark-gluon plasma. We consider Pb+Pb collisions performed in conditions specific to the LHC and examine the magnitude and behaviour of the polarization as measured in different frames, the effects of the pre-equilibrium gluon abundance, and we derive a one-to-one mapping between dielectron and dimuon polarization.