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    Electromagnetic Tomography of Radial Flow in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

    Lipei Du1,2,* and Ulrich Heinz3

    • *Contact author: ldu2@lbl.gov

    Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 102301 – Published 11 March, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ptyq-cs9m

    Abstract

    We present a novel multimessenger approach to extract the effective radial flow of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by jointly analyzing thermal photon and dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions. A key feature of this method is that it circumvents the need for a directly unmeasurable reference—the photon temperature in the absence of flow—by establishing, within a calibrated model framework, a stable, approximately linear correlation with the dilepton-inferred temperature. This construction defines an experimentally constructible quantity, vreff, which reflects early-time collectivity and exhibits a strong correlation with the spacetime-averaged radial velocity of the QGP. Together with previous results linking dilepton slopes to the initial QGP temperature, our work establishes a consistent framework for electromagnetic tomography of the QGP. Our framework quantifies the experimental precision target, thereby providing a concrete road map for future measurements at RHIC and the LHC and opening a new avenue to probe the early-time dynamics of hot QCD matter.

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