Low mass dilepton radiation at RHIC Original Research Article

In this work we discuss the emission of low mass dilepton radiation from a hydrodynamic evolution model of Au–Au collisions and make comparisons with recent PHENIX measurements. The dilepton emission rates from the hadronic phase are treated at finite temperature and Baryon density and are completely constrained by broken chiral symmetry in a density expansion. The rates are expressed in terms of vacuum correlators which are measured in e+e− annihilation, τ decays and photo-reactions on nucleons and nuclei. We consider two possibilities for the hadronic phase: A chemical equilibrated an off equilibrium hadronic gas. We find that while chemical off-equilibrium helps explain part of the low mass (0.15⩽M(GeV)⩽0.7) enhancement seen in the data there is still a large discrepancy.