# Flash of Prompt Photons from the Early Stage of Heavy-Ion Collisions

## From PCM to VNI; An Ode to KKG

It is incumbent on us to provide a comprehensive and accurate description of relativistic collision of nuclei from the instant of nuclear contact to the formation of hadronic states which are ultimately detected in experiments. Such collisions are expected to create: a) the conditions which prevailed at the time of early universe- a few micro-seconds after the big-bang, and thus, b) a strongly interacting matter under conditions of extreme temperatures and densities which would throw light on the “hallowed” quark-hadron phase transition.

A significant step in this direction was provided by the parton cascade model (PCM) pcm1  which was proposed to study the time evolution of the parton phase space distribution in relativistic nuclear collisions. In this approach the space-time description is formulated within renormalization group-improved QCD perturbation theory embedded in the framework of relativistic transport theory. The dynamics of the dissipative processes during the early stage of the nuclear reactions is thus simulated as the evolution of multiple internetted parton cascades associated with quark and gluon interactions. The model was considerably improved and extended pcm2  to include a number of new effects like individual time scale of each parton-parton collision, formation time of parton radiation, effective suppression of radiative emissions from virtual partons due to enhanced absorption probability of others in regions of dense phase space occupation and the effects of soft gluon interference for low energy gluon emissions, which all become important in nuclear collisions. With these improvements the model was used pcm3  to study the dynamics of partons in relativistic collision of gold nuclei at BNL RHIC and CERN LHC energies. In particular very useful information about the evolution of partons from pre-equilibrium to a thermalized quark-gluon plasma was obtained along with the temperature, energy-density, and entropy-density etc. It was demonstrated that energy densities in excess of an order of magnitude of the critical energy-density when a quark-hadron phase transition is expected, could be attained in such collisions. The model was further used to study the evolution of chemical evolution pcm4 , the production of strangeness, charm, and bottom pcm5 , dileptons pcm6 , and very recently- single photons pcm7  in such collisions.

The next important step pcm8  involved combining the above parton cascade model with a phenomenological cluster hadronization model chm1 ; chm2 ; chm3  which is motivated by the “preconfinement” property prec  of partons which is seen from the tendency of quarks and gluons produced in parton cascades to arrange themselves in colour neutral clusters, already at the perturbative level cnc . This approach provided a decent description of the experimentally measured momentum and multiplicity distributions for $`p\overline{p}`$ collisions at $`\sqrt{s}`$ = 200 – 1800 GeV, and was further used to predict the multiplicity distributions likely to be attained in relativistic heavy ion collisions at BNL RHIC and CERN LHC. A critical review of these developments along with details can be found in pcm9 .

However, the above description of hadron formation pcm8  did not explicitly account for the colour degree of freedom of the partons, which is, after-all, at the origin of confinement. To be specific, the “ansatz” for the confinement picture was based exclusively on the dynamically evolving space-time separations of nearest-neighbour colour charges in the parton cascade, rather than on the details of the colour structure of produced gluons, quarks, and anti-quarks. Thus, it was assumed that due to the above mentioned “pre-confinement” property of QCD, the partons which are close in colour (in particular minimal colour singlets) are also close in phase space. In other words, instead of using a colour flow description, the colour structure during the development of the cascade was ignored and at the end of perturbative evolution, colour neutral clusters were formed from partons which had a minimal separation in coordinate and momentum space.

It is known that this correspondence between the colour and space-time structures of a parton cascade is not an equivalence, but holds only in the average color . Thus, it has been argued that the colour structure of the cascade tree provides in principle, exact microscopic information about the flow of colour charges, whereas the space-time structure is based on our model for the statistical kinetic description of parton emission and the nearest-neighbour search, which may be subject to fluctuations that deviate from the exact colour-flow pcm10 . This issue is expected to become increasingly important when more particles populate a phase-space region, e.g. for small $`x`$ region in deep inelastic collisions and in hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions. Thus it is expected that in such cases, it is increasingly likely that the nearest neighbours in momentum and phase space would not necessarily form a colour singlet. It is also likely that the “natural” colour-singlet partner for a given parton within the same cascade (its “endogamous” partner) might actually be disfavoured in comparison with a colour singlet partner from a different but overlapping cascade (an “exogamous” partner). These consideration were incorporated in the hadronization scheme with colour flow discussed in Ref. pcm10 , where it was provided that if the space-time separation of two nearest-neighbour partons allows coalescence, they can always produce one or two color-singlet clusters, accompanied, if necessary, by the emission of a gluon or a quark that carries away any unbalanced net colour (see fig.5, Ref. pcm10 ).

This parton cascade -cluster hadronization model with colour flow is now available in the form of a fortran programme- VNI vni , and has already formed basis for some interesting studies at SPS energies pcm11 , and also to investigate the effect of the hadronic cascades at the end of the hadronization pcm12 .

There are very few examples in recent times, where one person has contributed so much in such a short time.

## Photons from cascading partons

Photons, either radiated or scattered, have remained one of the most effective probes of every kind of terrestrial or celestial matter over the ages. Thus, it is only befitting that the speculation of the formation of deconfined strongly interacting matter - some form of the notorious quark-gluon plasma (QGP) - in relativistic heavy ion collisions, was soon followed by a suggestion shuryak  that it should be accompanied by a characteristic radiation of photons. The effectiveness of photons in probing the history of such a hot and dense matter stems from the fact that, after production, they leave the system without any further interaction and thus carry unscathed information about the circumstances of their birth. This is a very important consideration indeed, as the formation of a QGP is likely to proceed from a hard-scattering of initial partons, through a pre-equilibrium stage, to perhaps a thermally and chemically equilibrated state of hot and dense partonic matter. This matter will hadronize and interaction among hadrons will also give rise to photons. In this letter we concentrate on photons coming from the early partonic stage in such collisions.

During the partonic stage, photons emerge from two different mechanisms: firstly, from collisions between partons, i.e., Compton scattering of quarks and gluons and annihilation of quarks and antiquarks; secondly, from radiation of excited partons, i.e. electromagnetic brems-strahlung of time-like cascading partons. Whereas the former mechanism has been studied in various contexts joe ; crs , the latter source of photons is less explored sjoestrand , although, as we shall show, it is potentially much richer both in magnitude and complexity.

The Parton Cascade Model (PCM) pcm9 , provides a fully dynamical description of relativistic heavy ion collisions. It is based on the parton picture of hadronic interactions and describes the nuclear dynamics in terms of the interaction of quarks and gluons within the perturbative quantum chromodynamics, embedded in the framework of relativistic transport theory. The time evolution of the system is simulated by solving an appropriate transport equation in a six-dimensional phase-pace using Monte Carlo methods. The procedure implemented in the computer code VNI vni  follows the dynamic evolution of of scattering, radiating, fusing, and clusterizing partons till they are all converted into hadrons. VNI, the Monte Carlo implementation of the PCM, has been adjusted on the basis of experimental data from $`e^+e^{}`$ annihilation and $`pp`$ $`(p\overline{p})`$ collisions.

As recounted earlier, the PCM has been extensively used to provide valuable insight into conditions likely to be achieved at RHIC and LHC energies pcm9 . Very recently, it has been found pcm11  to provide reasonable description to a large body of particle spectra from $`Pb+Pb`$ and $`S+S`$ collisions at CERN-SPS energies as well.

Prompt photons are ideally suited to test the evolution of the partonic matter as described by the PCM. They would accompany the early hard scatterings and the approach to the thermal and chemical equilibration. Most importantly, the PCM is free of assumptions of any type about the initial conditions, since the space-time evolution of the matter is calculated causally from the moment of collision onwards and at any point the state of the matter is determined by the preceding space-time history.

## $`qq\gamma `$ and $`qqg`$

There are some important and interesting differences between a scattering or a branching leading to production of photons and gluons, as has been pointed out nicely by Sjöstrand sjoestrand .

Consider an energetic quark produced in a hard scattering. It will radiate gluons and photons till its virtuality drops to some cut-off value $`\mu _0`$. The branchings $`qq\gamma `$ and $`qqg`$ appear in the PCM on an equal footing and as competing processes with similar structures. The probability, for a quark to branch at some given virtuality scale $`Q^2`$, with the daughter quark retaining a fraction $`z`$ of the energy of the mother quark, is given by:

$$d𝒫=\left(\frac{\alpha _s}{2\pi }C_F+\frac{\alpha _{\mathrm{em}}}{2\pi }e_q^2\right)\frac{dQ^2}{Q^2}\frac{1+z^2}{1z}dz$$
(1)   
where the first term corresponds to gluon emission and the second to photon emission. Thus, the relative probability for the two processes is,

$$\frac{𝒫_{qq\gamma }}{𝒫_{qqg}}\frac{\alpha _{\mathrm{em}}e_q^2}{\alpha _sC_F}\frac{1}{200},$$
(2)   
for $`\alpha _{\mathrm{em}}=1/137`$, $`\alpha _s=0.25`$, $`e_q^2`$ = 0.22 and $`C_F`$ = 4/3. This does not mean, though, that we can simulate emission of photons in a QCD shower by simply replacing the strong coupling constant $`\alpha _s`$ with the electromagnetic $`\alpha _{\mathrm{em}}`$ and the QCD colour Casimir factor $`C_F`$ by $`e_q^2`$. One has to keep in mind that the gluon, thus emitted, may branch further, either as $`ggg`$, or as $`gq\overline{q}`$; implying that the emitted gluon has an effective non-zero mass. As the corresponding probability for the photon to branch into a quark or a lepton pair is very small, this process is neglected and we take the photon to have a zero mass. (However, if we wish to study the dilepton production from the collision, this may become an important contribution pcm6 ; see later.)

Secondly, the radiation of gluons from the quarks is subject to soft-gluon interference which is enacted by imposing an angular ordering of the emitted gluons. This is not needed for the emitted photons. To recognize this aspect, consider a quark which has ‘already’ radiated a number of ‘hard’ gluons. The probability to radiate an additional ‘softer’ gluon will get contributions from each of the existing partons which may further branch as $`qqg`$ or $`ggg`$. It is well-known (see e.g.; Ref. cnc ) that if such a soft gluon is radiated at a large angle with respect to all the other partons and one adds the individual contributions incoherently, the emission rate would be overestimated, as the interference is destructive. This happens as a soft gluon of a long wave-length is not able to resolve the individual colour charges and sees only the net charge. The probabilistic picture of PCM is then recovered by demanding that emissions are ordered in terms of decreasing opening angle between the two daughter partons at each branching, i.e., restricting the phase-space allowed for the successive branchings. The photons, on the other hand, do not carry any charge and only the quarks radiate. Thus this angular ordering is not needed for them.

Finally, the parton emission probabilities in the QCD showers contain soft and collinear singularities, which are regulated by introducing a cut-off scale $`\mu _0`$. This regularization procedure implies effective masses for quarks and gluons,

$$m_{\mathrm{eff}}^{(q)}=\sqrt{\frac{\mu _0^2}{4}+m_q^2}m_{\mathrm{eff}}^{(g)}=\frac{\mu _0}{2},$$
(3)   
where $`m_q`$ is the current quark mass. Thus the gluons cannot branch unless their mass is more than $`2m_{\mathrm{eff}}^{(g)}=\mu _0`$, while a quark cannot branch unless its mass is more than $`m_{\mathrm{eff}}^{(q)}+m_{\mathrm{eff}}^{(g)}`$. An appropriate value for $`\mu _0`$ is about 1 GeV pcm9 ; a larger value is not favoured by the data, and a smaller value will cause the perturbative expression to blow up. These arguments, however, do not apply for photon emission, since QED perturbation theory does not break-down and photons are not affected by confinement forces. Thus, in principle quarks can go on emitting photons till their mass reduces to current quark mass. One may further argue that if the confinement forces screen the “bare” quarks the effective cut-off can be of the order of a GeV. Thus we can choose the cut-off scale $`\mu _0`$ separately for the emission of photons and get valuable insight about confinement at work.

The discussion above was focussed on the production of photons from the branching of quarks. We also include the parton scattering processes in the PCM which yield photons: $`q+\overline{q}g+\gamma ,q+gq+\gamma ,`$ from annihilation and Compton processes, the perturbative cross-sections of which are well-known. In the PCM approach we treat these processes within a perturbative QCD if the transverse momentum of the process ($`p_T`$) is lager than some cut-off $`p_T^0`$; see p0 . Thus our results for these contributions will be strictly valid only for $`p_T>p_T^0`$. (This cut-off is introduced in the collision frame of the partons, and thus we shall have contributions even for smaller $`p_T`$ in the nucleus-nucleus c.m. frame.)

## Results

We study four examples: $`S+S`$ and $`Pb+Pb`$ collisions at SPS energies and $`S+S`$ and $`Au+Au`$ collisions at RHIC energies.

In Fig. 1 we have plotted the production of single photons from such a partonic matter in the central rapidity region for $`Pb+Pb`$ system at SPS energies. The dot-dashed histogram shows the contribution of Compton and annihilation processes mentioned above. The dashed and the solid histograms show the total contributions (i.e., including the branchings $`qq\gamma `$) when the virtuality cut-offs for the photon production is taken respectively as 0.01 and 1 GeV.

We see that prompt photons from the quark branching completely dominate the yield for $`p_T3`$ GeV, whereas at larger transverse momenta the photons coming from the collision processes dominate. The reduction of the virtuality cut-off for the $`qq\gamma `$ branching is seen to enhance the production of photons having lower transverse momenta as one expects.

We have also shown the production of single photons from $`pp`$ collisions for $`\sqrt{s}`$ 24 GeV, obtained by WA70 wa70 , NA24 na24 , and UA6 ua6  collaborations scaled by the nuclear thickness for zero impact parameter for the collision of lead nuclei. The solid curve gives the perturbative QCD results jean  for the $`pp`$ collisions scaled similarly. The dashed curve is a direct extrapolation of these results to lower $`p_T`$.

In Fig. 2 we have plotted the transverse momenta of the single photons in several rapidity bins for $`Pb+Pb`$ and $`S+S`$ systems at SPS energies. We see that the transverse spectra scale reasonably well with the ratio of the nuclear overlap for central collisions for the two systems $`T_{\mathrm{Pb}\mathrm{Pb}}/T_{\mathrm{S}\mathrm{S}}`$ 15.4, which is indicative of the origin of these photons basically from a collision mechanism. (Note that the time-like partons are generated only if there is a collision.) The slight deviation from this scaling seen at lower $`p_T`$ results in a $``$ 20% increase in the integrated yield at central rapidities. This is a good measure of the multiple scatterings in the PCM. In fact we have found that the number of hard scatterings in the $`Pb+Pb`$ system is $``$ 17 times more than that for the $`S+S`$ system which also essentially determines the ratio of the number of the photons produced in the two cases. We also note that the inverse slope of the $`p_T`$ distribution decreases at larger rapidities, which is suggestive of the fact that the “hottest” partonic system is formed at central rapidities.

In Fig. 3 we have plotted our results for $`S+S`$ and $`Au+Au`$ systems at RHIC energies in the same fashion as Fig. 2 above. We see that the inverse slope of the $`p_T`$ distribution is now larger and drops only marginally at larger rapidities, indicating that the partonic system is now “hotter” and spread over a larger range of rapidity. Even though the $`p_T`$ distribution of the photons is seen to roughly scale with the ratio of the nuclear overlap functions for central collisions $`T_{\mathrm{Au}\mathrm{Au}}/T_{\mathrm{S}\mathrm{S}}`$ 14.2, the integrated yield of photons for the $`Au+Au`$ is seen to be only about 12 times that for the $`S+S`$ system at the RHIC energies. We have again checked that the number of hard scatterings for the $`Au+Au`$ system is also only about 12 times that for the $`S+S`$ system. (Again note that we have switched off soft-scatterings completely, and the hard scatterings are permitted only if the $`p_T`$ is more than $`p_T^0`$ which is taken to be larger at higher energies; see p0 .)

This contrasting behaviour at SPS and RHIC energies seen in our work has a very interesting physical origin. At the SPS energies, the partonic system begins to get dense and multiple scatterings increase; specially for heavier colliding nuclei. At RHIC energies, the partonic system gets quite dense, and then the Landau Pomeranchuk effect starts playing an important role. We have implemented this in the PCM semi-phenomenologically; by inhibiting a new scattering of partons till the passage of their formation time after a given scattering. In a separate publication we have demonstrated that these competitive mechanisms can be seen at work by comparing results for zero impact parameter for different colliding nuclei.

## Discussions and summary

Before concluding, we would like to make some other observations.

Firstly, recall such branchings of the partons produced in hard collisions correspond to a next-to-leading-order correction in $`\alpha _s`$. These are known to be considerably enhanced for collinear emissions. The parton shower mechanism incorporated in the PCM amounts to including these enhanced contributions to all orders, instead of including all the terms for a given order rkellis .

It may also be added that the first-order corrections to the Compton and annihilation processes in the plasma have been studied by a number of authors pradip ; however in the plasma the $`Q^2(2T)^2`$, thus their contribution is limited to very low $`p_T`$. $`Q^2`$ is obviously much larger in the early hard scatterings, and thus the radiations from the emerging partons are much more intense and also populate higher transverse momenta, as seen in the present work.

The large yield of photons from the branching of energetic quarks preceding the formation of dense partonic matter opens an interesting possibility to look for a similar contribution to dilepton (virtual photon) production in such collisions. In fact a large yield of low-mass dileptons was reported from $`qq\mathrm{}\overline{\mathrm{}}`$ processes in PCM pcm6  calculations at RHIC energies. It is quite likely that this process also makes a substantial contribution to the “excess” low mass dileptons observed in sulfur and lead induced collisions studied at SPS energies.

Recall again that we have only included the contribution of photons from the partonic interactions in this work. It is quite likely that the hadrons produced at the end will also interact and produce photons which has been extensively studied in recent times (see, e.g. Ref. crs ). A comparison of typical results from, say, Ref. crs  with the present work shows that at the SPS energies the emission from the early hard partonic scatterings is of the same order as the photon production from later hadronic reactions, for $`p_T`$ 2–3 GeV, and dominates considerably over the same at higher transverse momenta. A comparison of our predictions (Fig.4) with the preliminary results reported by the WA98 collaboration WA98  in fact clearly demonstrates that the pre-equilibrium contributions evaluated in the present work will play a very important role in providing a proper description to the single photon data at lager $`p_T`$ from such collisions.

We conclude that the formation of a hot and dense partonic system in relativistic heavy ion collisions may be preceded by a strong flash of photons following the early hard scatterings. Their yield will, among several other intersting aspects, also throw light on the extent of multiple scattering encountered in these collisions.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of this work was done when I visited Klaus at the Brookhaven National Laboratory during December 15, 1997 to March 15, 1998. Little did I know that I would not see Klaus again. I was in e-mail contact with him till a day before he departed. I wondered what should I write, having done several things and having planned several things in collaboration with him and yet not being able to attend the workshop in his memory. The choice was not easy. This work appeared in print pcm7  in the September 1998 issue of the Physical Review C; with Klaus going away in a ‘flash’ just when these issues were perhaps being mailed. Yes Klaus;

> The world was listening   
> With so much attention,   
> Alas! you dozed off   
> While telling your tales..

Boss!, I will always miss you, remember you, and endeavour to complete all that we planned.

This work was supported in part by the D.O.E under contract no. DE-AC02-76H00016.