Dynamic Debye screening for a heavy-quark-antiquark pair traversing a quark-gluon plasma

Prediction of a photon peak in relativistic heavy ion collisions

We show that if a flavorless vector meson remains bound after deconfinement, and if its limiting velocity in the quark-gluon plasma is subluminal, then this meson produces a distinct peak in the spectrum of thermal photons emitted by the plasma. We also demonstrate that this effect is a universal property of all strongly coupled, large-N_{c} plasmas with a gravity dual. For the J/psi, the corresponding peak lies between 3 and 5 GeV and could be observed in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC.