Dileptons are among the golden probes of the deconfined medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. As they are emitted throughout the system’s evolution, they in particular encode direct information about pre-equilibrium dynamics. This talk focuses on phenomenology studies on the sensitivity of dilepton spectra to the timescale of equilibration, and to momentum-space anisotropies of the medium at early times, through the angular distribution of lepton pairs. In addition, recent measurements of jet quenching in OO collisions at the LHC further motivate the search for QGP dilepton production in light-ion systems, where, due to the shorter expected lifetime of the medium, the pre-equilibrium contribution may dominate over the thermal contribution in the intermediate mass range. We will thus discuss how dilepton measurements can help disentangle pre-equilibrium emission from Drell-Yan and later thermal production across system sizes, offering insight into the early stages of QCD matter.
CERN