No Arabic abstract
We calculate the energy and hydrostatic pressure densities of a hot quark-gluon plasma in thermal equilibrium through diagrammatic analyses of the statistical average, $langle Theta_{mu u} rangle$, of the energy-momentum-tensor operator $Theta_{mu u}$. To leading order at high temperature, the energy density of the long wave length modes is consistently extracted by applying the hard-thermal-loop resummation scheme to the operator-inserted no-leg thermal amplitudes $langle Theta_{mu u} rangle$. We find that, for the long wave length gluons, the energy density, being positive, is tremendously enhanced as compared to the noninteracting case, while, for the quarks, no noticeable deviation from the noninteracting case is found.
We study the energy loss of an energetic heavy quark produced in a high temperature quark-gluon plasma and travelling a finite distance before emerging in the vacuum. While the retardation time of purely collisional energy loss is found to be of the order of the Debye screening length, we find that the contributions from transition radiation and the Ter-Mikayelian effect do not compensate, leading to a reduction of the zeroth order (in an opacity expansion) energy loss.
Lattice-QCD results provide an opportunity to model, and extrapolate to finite baryon density, the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Upon fixing the scale of the thermal coupling constant and vacuum energy to the lattice data, the properties of resulting QGP equations of state (EoS) are developed. We show that the physical properties of the dense matter fireball formed in heavy ion collision experiments at CERN-SPS are well described by the QGP-EoS we presented. We also estimate the properties of the fireball formed in early stages of nuclear collision, and argue that QGP formation must be expected down to 40A GeV in central Pb--Pb interactions.
In this work we have studied the collisional energy loss of a heavy quark propagating through a high temperature QCD plasma consisting of both heavy and light quarks to leading logarithmic order in the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) coupling constant. The formalism adopted in this work shows a significant enhancement for the charm quark energy loss when the bath particles are also considered to be heavy in addition to light quarks. We know the running coupling constant is dependent on the momentum of the particles and the temperature of the system. Therefore, we have presented a comparison of the energy loss of the charm quark due to scattering with another heavy quark with constant and running coupling constant for different temperatures. The results show a substantial increase of the energy loss when compared to the fixed coupling case.
Penetrating probes in heavy-ion collisions, like jets and photons, are sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced quark-gluon plasma, such as shear and bulk viscosity. Quantifying this sensitivity requires a detailed understanding of photon emission and jet-medium interaction in a non-equilibrium plasma. Up to now, such an understanding has been hindered by plasma instabilities which arise out of equilibrium and lead to spurious divergences when evaluating the rate of interaction of hard probes with the plasma. In this paper, we show that taking into account the time evolution of an unstable plasma cures these divergences. We calculate the time evolution of gluon two-point correlators in a setup with small initial momentum anisotropy and show that the gluon occupation density grows exponentially at early times. Based on this calculation, we argue for a phenomenological prescription where instability poles are subtracted. Finally, we show that in the Abelian case instability fields do not affect medium-induced photon emission to our order of approximation.
We present an extension of the Arnold-Moore-Yaffe kinetic equations for jet energy loss to NLO in the strong coupling constant. A novel aspect of the NLO analysis is a consistent description of wider-angle bremsstrahlung (semi-collinear emissions), which smoothly interpolates between 2<->2 scattering and collinear bremsstrahlung. We describe how many of the ingredients of the NLO transport equations (such as the drag coefficient) can be expressed in terms of Wilson line operators and can be computed using a Euclidean formalism or sum rules, both motivated by the analytic properties of amplitudes at light-like separations. We conclude with an outlook on the computation of the shear viscosity at NLO.