Low-mass dileptons at high momenta in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract We calculate the emission rate of low-mass dileptons at high momenta from a quark-gluon plasma. We find a large enhancement compared with the naive Born rate. Numerical estimates for relativistic heavy ions collisions at RHIC and LHC suggest, however, that the thermal signal is dominated by the background coming from meson decays and from hadronic bremsstrahlung.