Rapidity Distributions of Dileptons from a Hadronizing Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

It has been predicted that dilepton production may be used as a quark-gluon plasma probe. We calculate the rapidity distributions of thermal dileptons produced by an evolving quark-gluon plasma assuming a longitudinal scaling expansion with initial conditions locally determined from the hadronic rapidity density. These distributions are compared with Drell-Yan production and semileptonic charm decays at invariant mass $M = 2$, 4, and 6 GeV.

17 pages (standard LaTeX), 6 figures (available as topdraw files or printed versions upon request), GSI-93-65