We extract the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient kappa and the resulting momentum broadening <p^2> in a far-from-equilibrium non-Abelian plasma. We find several features in the time dependence of the momentum broadening: a short initial rapid growth of <p^2>, followed by linear growth with time due to Langevin-type dynamics and damped oscillations around this growth at the plasmon frequency. We show that these novel oscillations are not easily explained using perturbative techniques but result from an excess of gluons at low momenta. These oscillation are therefore a gauge invariant confirmation of the infrared enhancement we had previously observed in gauge-fixed correlation functions. We argue that the kinetic theory description of such systems becomes less reliable in the presence of this IR enhancement.
We study the heavy-quark momentum diffusion coefficient in far from equilibrium gluon plasma in a self-similar regime using real-time lattice techniques. We use 3 methods for the extraction: an unequal time electric field 2-point correlator integrated over the time difference, a spectral reconstruction (SR) method based on the measured equal time electric field correlator and a kinetic theory (KT) formula. The time-evolution of the momentum diffusion coefficient extracted using all methods is consistent with an approximate $t^{frac{-1}{2}}$ power law. We also study the extracted diffusion coefficient as a function of the upper limit of the time integration and observe that including the infrared enhancement of the equal-time correlation function in the SR calculation improves the agreement with the data for transient time behavior considerably. This is a gauge invariant confirmation of the infrared enhancement previously observed only in gauge fixed correlation functions.
We evaluate heavy-quark (HQ) transport properties in a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) employing interaction potentials extracted from thermal lattice QCD. Within a Brueckner many-body scheme we calculate in-medium T-matrices for charm- and bottom-quark scattering off light quarks in the QGP. The interactions are dominated by attractive meson and diquark channels which support bound and resonance states up to temperatures of ~1.5 T_c. We apply pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients (supplemented by perturbative scattering off gluons) in Langevin simulations in an expanding fireball to compute HQ spectra and elliptic flow in sqrt{s_{NN}}=200 GeV Au-Au collisions. We find good agreement with semileptonic electron-decay spectra which supports our nonperturbative computation of the HQ diffusion coefficient, suggestive for a strongly coupled QGP.
The thesis contains studies of properties quark-gluon plasma, using some non-perturbative techniques. It contains a brief introduction of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and discussion on various signatures along with a motivation for this thesis work. It presents the basic mathematical tools and ingredients required for the thesis, i.e. basics of QCD, Imaginary and Real Time Formalism, Hard Thermal Loop perturbation theory (HTLpt), Gribov-Zwanziger (GZ) action, the Correlation Function along with the Spectral Function and Operator Product Expansion (OPE) and QCD in magnetized medium. OPE is used to compute the dilepton rate in intermediate mass range by incorporating the non-perturbative dynamics of QCD through the inclusion of non-vanishing quark and gluon condensates in combination with the Green functions in momentum space. Also the magnetic scale (g^2T) in the HTL perturbation theory, related to the confining properties of the QCD is taken into account using the GZ action through a mass parameter, which reflects a new space-like quark mode in the collective excitation. The impact of this new exciting mode on the DPR has been studied and its important consequences has been discussed. A hot magnetized medium introduces another scale in the system in addition to temperature. Electromagnetic spectral properties and DPR are studied completely analytically in presence of both strong and weak background magnetic fields at finite temperature. The Debye screening in a hot and magnetized medium has been studied which reveals some of the intriguing properties of the medium in presence of both strong and weak magnetic field. Also an important quantity that characterizes the QGP, namely quark number susceptibility has been investigated. Most of the non-perturbative results discussed in this thesis are compared with those of perturbative ones and lattice QCD.
We study the energy loss of a heavy quark propagating in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) in the framework of the Moller theory, including possible large Coulomb logarithms as a perturbation to BDMPSZ bremsstrahlung, described in the Harmonic Oscillator (HO) approximation. We derive the analytical expression that describes the energy loss in the entire emitted gluon frequency region. In the small frequencies region, for angles larger than the dead cone angle, the energy loss is controlled by the BDMPSZ mechanism, while for larger frequencies it is described by N=1 term in the GLV opacity expansion. We estimate corresponding quenching rates for different values of the heavy quark path and different $m/E$ ratios.
Quark-gluon plasma produced at the early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is unstable, if weakly coupled, due to the anisotropy of its momentum distribution. Chromomagnetic fields are spontaneously generated and can reach magnitudes much exceeding typical values of the fields in equilibrated plasma. We consider a high energy test parton traversing an unstable plasma that is populated with strong fields. We study the momentum broadening parameter $hat q$ which determines the radiative energy loss of the test parton. We develop a formalism which gives $hat q$ as the solution of an initial value problem, and we focus on extremely oblate plasmas which are physically relevant for relativistic heavy ion collisions. The parameter $hat q$ is found to be strongly dependent on time. For short times it is of the order of the equilibrium value, but at later times $hat q$ grows exponentially due to the interaction of the test parton with unstable modes and becomes much bigger than the value in equilibrium. The momentum broadening is also strongly directionally dependent and is largest when the test parton velocity is transverse to the beam axis. Consequences of our findings for the phenomenology of jet quenching in relativistic heavy ion collisions are briefly discussed.