Centrality Dependence of Direct Photons in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV

Abstract

We calculate the spectra of high energy photons emitted in relativistic Au+Au collisions for various centralities and compare to data recently collected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider by the PHENIX collaboration. Our results for photons from primary hard scatterings and photons from interactions of jets with the medium are consistent with the measurements of neutral pion and direct photon production in p+p collisions and give a good description of direct photon spectra measured in Au+Au collisions. The contribution of photons from jet-to-photon conversion in the medium can be as large as the photon yield from hard scatterings in the momentum range p_T = 2...6 GeV/c. We show that this novel mechanism is not ruled out by any existing data.