RATES FOR DILEPTON PRODUCTION AT RHIC AND LHC BETWEEN THE J/PSI AND GAMMA ARE BIG

We study the problem of dilepton production in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. We find that, due to the expected enhanced multiplicities and larger transverse momenta of hadrons arising from minijet production, the dilepton production rate dramatically increases. We consider two extreme limits: a thermalized, hydrodynamically expanding quark-gluon plasma and a free-streaming, non-interacting gas of quarks and gluons. In both cases we find that the dilepton rate arising from electromagnetic annihilations of the quarks is significantly larger than that of the Drell-Yan process for dilepton masses between the J/PSI and the UPSILON.