Jet quenching and direct photon production

Abstract

Jet quenching effect has been investigated in the direct photon production, based on a realistic data-constrained (3+1) dimensional hydrodynamic description of the expanding hot and dense matter, a reasonable treatment of the propagation of partons and their energy loss in the fluid, and a systematic study of the main sources of direct photons. Our resultant \pt spectra agree with recent PHENIX data in a broad \pt range. Parton energy loss in the plasma eventually effect significantly direct photon production from fragmentation and jet photon conversion, similar to hadron suppression in central heavy ion collisions. But this only causes about 40% decrease in the total production of direct photons, due to the mixture with other direct photon sources.Comment: 6 pages and 3 figures, To appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark matter (SQM2008), Beijing, China, Oct 6-10, 200