A lattice calculation of thermal dilepton rates

Using clover improved Wilson fermions we calculate thermal vector meson correlation functions above the deconfinement phase transition of quenched QCD. At temperatures 1.5 T-c and 3 T-c. they are found to differ by less than 15%, from that of a freely propagating quark-anti-quark pair. This puts severe constraints on the dilepton production rate and in particular rules out a strong divergence of the dilepton rate at low energies. The vector spectral function, which has been reconstructed using the Maximum Entropy Method, yields an enhancement of the dilepton rate over the Born rate of at most a factor two in the energy interval 4 less than or similar to omega/T less than or similar to 8 and suggests that the spectrum is cut-off at low energies by a thermal mass threshold of about (2-3)T. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.