Hard photon production from unsaturated quark-gluon plasma at two-loop level

The hard photon production from bremsstrahlung and annihilation with scattering that arise at two-loop level are estimated for a chemically non-equilibrated quark-gluon plasma in the framework of Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) resummed effective field theory. The rate of photon production is found to be suppressed due to unsaturated phase space compared to equilibrated plasma. For an unsaturated plasma, unlike the effective one-loop case, the reduction in the effective two-loop processes is found to be independent of gluon fugacity, due to an additional collinear enhancement arising from the decrease in thermal quark mass but strongly depends on quark and antiquark fugacities. It is also found that the photon production is dominated by bremsstrahlung mechanism, since the phase space suppression is higher for annihilation with scattering, in contrast to the equilibrated plasma where annihilation with scattering dominates the photon production. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.