Photon bremsstrahlung from heavy quarks in a dense nuclear matter

Abstract

We study the bremsstrahlung photon production from a hard jet parton induced by rescattering with a dense nuclear medium. Using the charged current interaction channel of deep inelastic scattering between an electron and a large nucleus, we derive the spectrum of medium-induced photons emitted from high-energy heavy and light quarks at the next-to-leading twist in a unified framework. Going beyond the collinear expansion approximation, we show that the photon spectrum is determined by the full momentum distribution of the gluon exchanged between the propagating quark and the medium, or equivalently, by the differential elastic scattering rate of the hard quark inside the medium. Modeling the gluon field with a static Debye screened potential reduces the photon spectrum to a dependence on the transverse momentum distribution of the exchanged gluon. This work provides a more reliable input for future phenomenological studies of quark mass effects on jet-induced photon production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.