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Dilepton production in a rotating thermal medium: The rigid rotation approximation

Jorge David Castaño-Yepes1,* and Enrique Muñoz2,3,†

  • 1Departamento de Física, Universidad del Valle, Ciudad Universitaria Meléndez, Santiago de Cali 760032, Colombia
  • 2Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile
  • 3Center for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials CIEN-UC, Avenida Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile

  • *Contact author: jorge.yepes@correounivalle.edu.co
  • †Contact author: ejmunozt@uc.cl
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 116001 – Published 1 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/fkfs-nlbm

Abstract

We investigate dilepton production in a thermalized quark-gluon plasma subject to global rotation, in the rigid rotating approximation. We consider a generic process involving quark-antiquark annihilation followed by the emission of a highly energetic virtual photon decaying into a dilepton pair. For this process, we compute the dilepton emission rate from the imaginary part of the photon polarization tensor, at finite temperature and vorticity. Our results show that vorticity induces characteristic modifications in the light dilepton channel, namely, e−e+ production, where the emission spectrum exhibits a suppression at low transverse mass together with a mild shift of the production threshold. This behavior originates from the role of vorticity as an effective spin-dependent chemical potential that alters the available phase-space distribution for the emission process. In contrast, the μ−μ+ channel is more weakly affected by the rotational background, thus remaining dominated by its intrinsic mass threshold. The resulting channel dependence highlights a potential phenomenological handle for disentangling rotational effects in heavy-ion collisions: while light dilepton spectra encode the imprints of vorticity in the infrared sector, the muon channel provides a comparatively robust baseline.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 116001– Published 1 June, 2026
  • Received 21 September 2025
  • Accepted 7 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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