Photon production in relativistic nuclear collisions at SPS and RHIC energies

Chiral Lagrangians are used to compute the production rate of photons from the hadronic phase of relativistic nuclear collisions. Special attention is paid to the role of the pseudovector a_1 meson. Calculations that include reactions with strange mesons, hadronic form factors and vector spectral densities consistent with dilepton production, as well as the emission from a quark-gluon plasma and primordial nucleon-nucleon collisions, reproduce the photon spectra measured at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). Predictions for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are made.