A lattice study of the jet quenching parameter
Abstract
We present a first-principle computation of the jet quenching parameter, which describes the momentum broadening of a high-energy parton moving through the deconfined state of QCD matter at high temperature. Following an idea originally proposed by Caron-Huot, we explain how one can evaluate the soft contribution to the collision kernel characterizing this real-time phenomenon, analyzing certain gauge-invariant operators in a dimensionally reduced effective theory (electrostatic QCD), which can be studied non-perturbatively via simulations on a Euclidean lattice. Our high-precision numerical computations at two different temperatures indicate that soft contributions to the jet quenching parameter are large. After discussing the systematic uncertainties involved, we present a quantitative estimate for the jet quenching parameter in the temperature range accessible at heavy-ion colliders, and compare it to results from phenomenological models as well as to strong-coupling computations based on the holographic correspondence.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1307.5850,
title = {A lattice study of the jet quenching parameter},
author = {Marco Panero and Kari Rummukainen and Andreas Schäfer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.5850},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
1+33 pages, 6 pdf figures; v2: section 3 improved, misprints corrected, bibliography updated: a shortened version of this manuscript has been published in the journal