Bremsstrahlung from an Equilibrating Quark-Gluon Plasma

The photon production rate from a chemically equilibrating quark-gluon plasma likely to be produced at RHIC (BNL) and LHC (CERN) energies is computed taking into account bremsstrahlung. The plasma is assumed to be in local thermal equilibrium, but with a phase space distribution that deviates from the Fermi or Bose distribution by space-time dependent factors (fugacities). The photon spectrum is obtained by integrating the photon rate over the space-time history of the plasma, adopting a boost invariant cylindrically symmetric transverse expansion of the system with different nuclear profile functions. Initial conditions obtained from a self-screened parton cascade calculation and, for comparison, from the HIJING model are used. Compared to the equilibrium case a suppression of the photon yield by one to three orders of magnitude is observed. Furthermore the photon production due to bremsstrahlung from the chemically nonequilibrated plasma dominates over the emission from Compton scattering and quark-antiquark annihilation at LHC energies, whereas the both processes are of the same order at RHIC energies.