Direct photon elliptic flow at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the CERN Large Hadron Collider

We use an event-by-event hydrodynamical description of the heavy-ion collision process with Glauber initial conditions to calculate the thermal emission of photons. The photon rates in the hadronic phase follow from a spectral function approach and a density expansion, while in the partonic phase they follow from the Arnold-Moore-Yaffe (AMY) perturbative rates. The calculated photon elliptic flows are lower than those reported recently by both the ALICE and PHENIX collaborations.