Rapidity dependence of thermal dileptons resulting from hadronizing quark-gluon matter with finite baryon charge
The influence of a non-vanishing baryon charge on the rapidity distribution of dileptons produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is studied. We employ a frozen motion model with scaling invariant expansion of the hadronizing quark-gluon plasma as well as a realistic rapidity distribution of secondary particles (i.e., pions and baryons) expected for RHIC energies. We demonstrate a sizeable suppression of the thermal dilepton yield at large rapidities due to the finite baryon density. This affects the most favorable rapidity window for using dileptons for the diagnostic of the quark-gluon plasma and the early temperature distribution of the hot reaction zone. To discriminate the thermal dileptons from Drell-Yan background we propose to utilize the dilepton yield scaled suitably by the pion multiplicity as function of rapidity.