No Arabic abstract
The quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions is anisotropic throughout its evolution. This anisotropy changes the physics of jet-medium interaction, making it dependent on the momentum direction of the jet. In this paper we analyze transverse momentum broadening of a jet parton interacting with soft gluons in an anisotropic plasma. Our analysis equally applies to momentum broadening of quasiparticles in kinetic theory. We subtract contribution from instability modes in the deep infrared and discuss how our calculation should be complemented in that regime. The resulting anisotropic collision kernel for momentum broadening is qualitatively different from the equilibrium collision kernel and from the isotropic ansatz used in effective kinetic theory. Because of increased medium screening, there is substantially less transverse broadening at low and intermediate momenta.
Broadening of the transverse momentum of a parton propagating through a medium is treated using the color dipole formalism, which has the advantage of being a well developed phenomenology in deep-inelastic scattering and soft processes. Within this approach, nuclear broadening should be treated as color filtering, i.e. absorption of large-size dipoles leading to diminishing (enlarged) transverse separation (momentum). We also present a more intuitive derivation based on the classic scattering theory of Moli`ere. This derivation helps to understand the origin of the dipole cross section, part of which comes from attenuation of the quark, while another part is due to multiple interactions of the quark. It also demonstrates that the lowest-order rescattering term provides an A-dependence very different from the generally accepted A^{1/3} behavior. The effect of broadening increases with energy, and we evaluate it using different phenomenological models for the unintegrated gluon density. Although the process is dominated by soft interactions, the phenomenology we use is tested using hadronic cross section data.
We utilize the technology of open quantum systems in conjunction with the recently developed effective field theory for forward scattering to address the question of massless jet propagation through a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma in thermal equilibrium. We discuss various possible hierarchies of scales that may appear in this problem, by comparing thermal scales of the plasma with relevant scales in the effective field theory. Starting from the Lindblad equation, we derive and solve a master equation for the transverse momentum distribution of a massless quark jet, at leading orders both in the strong coupling and in the power counting of the effective field theory. Markovian approximation is justified in the weak coupling limit. Using the solution to the master equation, we study the transverse momentum broadening of a jet as a function of the plasma temperature and the time of propagation. We discuss the physical origin of infrared sensitivity that arises in the solution and a way to handle it in the effective field theory formulation. We suspect that the final measurement constraint can only cut-off leading infrared singularities and the solution to the Markovian master equation resums a logarithmic series. This work is a stepping stone towards understanding jet quenching and jet substructure observables on both light and heavy quark jets as probes of the quark-gluon plasma.
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.
We determine the hard-loop resummed propagator in an anisotropic QCD plasma in general covariant gauges and define a potential between heavy quarks from the Fourier transform of its static limit. We find that there is stronger attraction on distance scales on the order of the inverse Debye mass for quark pairs aligned along the direction of anisotropy than for transverse alignment.
Due to the rapid longitudinal expansion of the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions, large local-rest-frame momentum-space anisotropies are generated during the systems evolution. These momentum-space anisotropies complicate the modeling of heavy-quarkonium dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma due to the fact that the resulting inter-quark potentials are spatially anisotropic, requiring real-time solution of the 3D Schrodinger equation. Herein, we introduce a method for reducing anisotropic heavy-quark potentials to isotropic ones by introducing an effective screening mass that depends on the quantum numbers $l$ and $m$ of a given state. We demonstrate that, using the resulting effective Debye screening masses, one can solve a 1D Schrodinger equation and reproduce the full 3D results for the energies and binding energies of low-lying heavy-quarkonium bound states to relatively high accuracy. The resulting effective isotropic potential models could provide an efficient method for including momentum-anisotropy effects in open quantum system simulations of heavy-quarkonium dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma.