This document provides a summary of the discussions during the recent joint QCD Town Meeting at Temple University of the status of and future plans for the research program of the relativistic heavy-ion community. A list of compelling questions is fo
rmulated, and a number of recommendations outlining the greatest research opportunities and detailing the research priorities of the heavy-ion community, voted on and unanimously approved at the Town Meeting, are presented. They are supported by a broad discussion of the underlying physics and its relation to other subfields. Areas of overlapping interests with the QCD and Hadron Structure (cold QCD) subcommunity, in particular the recommendation for the future construction of an Electron-Ion Collider, are emphasized. The agenda of activities of the hot QCD subcommunity at the Town Meeting is attached.
Photons are a penetrating probe of the hot medium formed in heavy-ion collisions, but they are emitted from all collision stages. At photon energies below 2-3 GeV, the measured photon spectra are approximately exponential and can be characterized by
their inverse logarithmic slope, often called effective temperature $T_mathrm{eff}$. Modelling the evolution of the radiating medium hydrodynamically, we analyze the factors controlling the value of $T_mathrm{eff}$ and how it is related to the evolving true temperature $T$ of the fireball. We find that at RHIC and LHC energies most photons are emitted from fireball regions with $T{,sim,}T_mathrm{c}$ near the quark-hadron phase transition, but that their effective temperature is significantly enhanced by strong radial flow. Although a very hot, high pressure early collision stage is required for generating this radial flow, we demonstrate that the experimentally measured large effective photon temperatures $T_mathrm{eff}{,>,}T_mathrm{c}$, taken alone, do not prove that any electromagnetic radiation was actually emitted from regions with true temperatures well above $T_mathrm{c}$. We explore tools that can help to provide additional evidence for the relative weight of photon emission from the early quark-gluon and late hadronic phases. We find that the recently measured centrality dependence of the total thermal photon yield requires a larger contribution from late emission than presently encoded in our hydrodynamic model.
