  In the early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions chiral symmetry
is restored temporarily. During this so-called chiral phase transition, the
quark masses change from their constituent to their bare values. This mass
shift leads to the spontaneous non-perturbative creation of quark-antiquark
pairs, which effectively contributes to the formation of the quark-gluon
plasma. We investigate the photon production induced by this creation process.
We provide an approach that eliminates possible unphysical contributions from
the vacuum polarization and renders the resulting photon spectra integrable
inthe ultraviolet domain. The off-equilibrium photon numbers are of quadratic
order in the perturbative coupling constants while a thermal production is only
of quartic order. Quantitatively, we find, however, that for the most physical
mass-shift scenarios and for photon momenta larger than 1 GeV the
off-equilibrium processes contribute less photons than the thermal processes.

Nuclear Theory;High Energy Physics - Phenomenology