Dileptons and photons from coarse-grained microscopic dynamics and hydrodynamics compared to experimental data

We compute the radiation of dileptons and photons using relativistic hydrodynamics and a coarse-grained version of the microscopic event generator UrQMD, both of which provide a good description of the hadron spectra. The currently most accurate dilepton and photon emission rates from perturbative QCD and from experimentally-based hadronic calculations are used. Comparisons are made to data on central Pb-Pb and Pb-Au collisions taken at the CERN SPS at a beam energy of 158 A GeV. Both hydrodynamics and UrQMD provide very good descriptions of the photon transverse momentum spectrum measured between 1 and 4 GeV, but very slightly underestimate the low mass spectrum of e ⁺e^- pairs, even with greatly broadened ρ and ω vector mesons.