A Reanalysis of Single Photon Data at CERN SPS Original Research Article

We reanalyze the WA98 single photon data [M. M. Aggarwal et al. [WA98 Collaboration], Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3595 (2000)] at CERN SPS by incorporating several recent developments in the study of prompt and thermal photon production from relativistic heavy ion collisions [R. Chatterjee, D. K. Srivastava, and S. Jeon, Phys. Rev. C 79, 034906 (2009)]. Isospin and shadowing corrected NLO pQCD, along with an optimized scale for factorization, fragmentation and renormalization are considered for prompt photon production. Photons from thermal medium are estimated by considering a boost invariant azimuthally anisotropic hydrodynamic expansion of the plasma along with a well tested equation of state and initial conditions. A quantitative explanation of the data is obtained by combining κ× prompt with thermal photons, where κ is an overall scaling factor. We show that, elliptic flow of thermal photons can play a crucial role to distinguish between the ‘with’ and ‘without’ phase transition scenarios at SPS energy.