Deep inelastic scattering off quark-gluon plasma and its photon emissivity

The photon emissivity of quark-gluon plasma probes the interactions in the medium and differs qualitatively between a weakly coupled and a strongly coupled plasma in the soft-photon regime. The photon emissivity is given by the product of kinematic factors and a spectral function associated with the two-point correlator of the electromagnetic current at lightlike kinematics. A certain Euclidean correlator at imaginary spatial momentum can be calculated in lattice QCD and is given by an integral over the relevant spectral function at lightlike kinematics. I present a first exploratory lattice calculation of this correlator. Secondly, I show how Euclidean correlators at imaginary spatial momenta can also be used to probe the regime of deep inelastic scattering off quark-gluon plasma, which reveals its parton distribution function. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)