Photon production in high energy heavy ion collisions

The production of photons in the energy range of 0 to 3 GeV is discussed as a signature of the creation of a quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. However, they are also created in the hadronic phase. Therefore I investigate the role of the pirho → pigamma and pio → pigamma reactions in the photon emission from hot hadronic matter, and I compare their respective importance. These reactions are known to be the leading contributions. For this purpose I use diverse effective chiral Lagrangians that are in accord with known empirical properties of strong interaction. Then I discuss the relevance of my work to heavy ion collisions