Excitation of Chandrasekhar-Kendall photons in quark gluon plasma by propagating ultrarelativistic quarks

A quark propagating through the quark gluon plasma and scattering off the thermal gluons can radiate photons in states with definite angular momentum and magnetic helicity. These states, known as the Chandrasekhar-Kendall states, are eigenstates of the curl operator and have a nontrivial topology. I compute the spectrum of these states in the ultrarelativistic limit and study its properties.

Figure 1

Function $F_{lm}^h\left(x\right)$ at $l=10,h=1$, and different $m$. It is invariant under the simultaneous replacement $m\to -m$ and $h\to -h$. Variable $x$ is the CK photon energy in units of the plasma temperature.