Signatures of Thermal Dilepton Radiation at RHIC

Abstract

The properties of thermal dilepton production from heavy-ion collisions in the RHIC energy regime are evaluated for invariant masses ranging from 0.5 to 3 GeV. Using an expanding thermal fireball to model the evolution through both quark-gluon and hadronic phases various features of the spectra are addressed. In the low-mass region, due to an expected large background, the focus is on possible medium modifications of the narrow resonance structures from $\omega$ and $\phi$ mesons, whereas in the intermediate-mass region the old idea of identifying QGP radiation is reiterated including effects of chemical under-saturation in the early stages of central Au+Au collisions.