Pre-equilibrium photons from the early stages of heavy-ion collisions

Abstract: We use QCD kinetic theory to compute photon production in the chemically equilibrating Quark-Gluon Plasma created in the early stages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We do a detailed comparison of pre-equilibrium photon rates to the thermal photon production. We show that the photon spectrum radiated from a hydrodynamic attractor evolution satisfies a simple scaling form in terms of the specific shear viscosity $\eta/s$ and entropy density $dS/d\zeta \sim {\scriptstyle \left(T\tau^{1/3}\right)^{3/2}}_\infty$. We confirm the analytical predictions with numerical kinetic theory simulations. We use the extracted scaling function to compute the pre-equilibrium photon contribution in $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76\,\text{TeV}$ 0-20\% PbPb collisions. We demonstrate that our matching procedure allows for a smooth switching from pre-equilibrium kinetic to thermal hydrodynamic photon production. Finally, our publicly available implementation can be straightforwardly added to existing heavy ion models.