Production and elliptic flow of dileptons and photons in a matrix model of the quark-gluon plasma.
We consider a nonperturbative approach to the thermal production of dileptons and photons at temperatures near the critical temperature in QCD. The suppression of colored excitations at low temperature is modeled by including a small value of the Polyakov loop, in a "semi"-quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Comparing the semi-QGP to the perturbative QGP, we find a mild enhancement of thermal dileptons. In contrast, to leading logarithmic order in weak coupling there are far fewer hard photons from the semi-QGP than the usual QGP. To illustrate the possible effects on photon and dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions, we integrate the rate with a simulation using ideal hydrodynamics. Dileptons uniformly exhibit a small flow, but the strong suppression of photons in the semi-QGP tends to weight the elliptical flow of photons to that generated in the hadronic phase.