Dileptons serve as a clean and penetrating probe of the quark-gluon plasma created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. In this work, we investigate thermal dilepton spectra and their elliptic flow through the dynamical conductivity that governs the production rate. The conductivity is obtained from the trace of the spectral function within relativistic kinetic theory using the relaxation time approximation. This allows us to derive for the first time an analytical expression for the dilepton rate with explicit dependence on the relaxation time of quark-antiquark interactions. We find a nonmonotonic dependence of the dilepton rate on the relaxation time and compare the resulting transverse momentum, invariant mass spectra, and elliptic flow with previous quantum field theory results. The spectra and elliptic flow are obtained by integrating the rate over the full spacetime volume of the evolving medium, using temperature and flow profiles from realistic music hydrodynamic simulations without considering the effect of magnetic fields in the profiles itself. However, we study the role of an external space-time-dependent magnetic field by making the conductivity anisotropic. At small relaxation times, magnetic fields have negligible impact, while for larger relaxation times and stronger initial fields, modifications of up to $\sim 20\%$ appear in both spectra and elliptic flow. Assuming instead a constant magnetic field of $\sim 1m_{\pi }^2$ at large relaxation times yields more modest effects, with changes of about 10% in spectra and 5% in elliptic flow.

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• Collective flow
• Hydrodynamic models
• Kinetic theory
• Photon, lepton & quark production
• Quark-gluon plasma
• Relativistic heavy-ion collisions