Collinear Photon Emission from the Quark-Gluon Plasma: The Light-Cone Path Integral Formulation

Abstract

We give a simple physical derivation of the photon emission rate from the weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma connected with the collinear processes $q\to \gamma q$ and $q\bar{q}\to \gamma$. The analysis is based on the light-cone path integral approach to the induced radiation. Our results agree with that by Arnold, Moore and Yaffe obtained using the real-time thermal perturbation theory. It is demonstrated that the solution of the AMY integral equation is nothing but the time-integrated Green's function of the light-cone path integral approach written in the momentum representation.