Untangling the evolution of heavy ion collisions using direct photon interferometry

Recently, two scenarios have been proposed to resolve the discrepancy between photon yield and the flow coefficients measured in nuclear collisions at RHIC and the LHC. In the first, additional photons are produced from the early pre-equilibrium stage computed from the "bottom-up" thermalization scenario. In the second, the thermal rates are enhanced close to the pseudo-critical temperature T_c \sim155MeV using a phenomenological ansatz. We...