QGP formation time and direct photons from heavy ion collisions

We investigated the information carried by the data of direct photons, ie, the transverse momentum spectrum and the elliptic flow $v_{2}$ from Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=2.76TeV measured at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and from Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$= 200 GeV measured at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), in the frame work of (3+1)-dimensional ideal hydrodynamical models constrained with hadronic data. We found those direct photon data may serve as a useful clock at the early stage of heavy ion collisions. The time scales of reaching thermal and chemical equilibrium, extracted from those data, are about 1/3 and 1.5 fm/c, respectively. Thus the large elliptic flow of direct photons is explainable. High order harmonics, ie, $v_3$, $v_4$ and $v_5$, of direct photons from Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76TeV are also predicted, as a further test to compete with those who claim new sources of photons to account for the large elliptic flow of direct photons.

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