English

Anomalous diffusion in QCD matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2022-10-05 v1 Statistical Mechanics Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We study the effects of quantum corrections on transverse momentum broadening of a fast parton passing through dense QCD matter. We show that, at leading logarithmic accuracy the broadening distribution tends at late times or equivalently for large system sizes LL to a universal distribution that only depends on a single scaling variable k2/Qs2k^2_\perp/Q^2_s where the typical transverse momentum scale increases with time as lnQs2(1+2β)lnL32(1+β)lnlnL\ln Q_s^2 \simeq (1+2 \beta ) \ln L - \frac{3}{2}(1+\beta )\,\ln\ln L up to non-universal terms, with an anomalous dimension βαs\beta \sim \sqrt{\alpha_s} . This property is analogous to geometric scaling of gluon distributions in the saturation regime and traveling waves solutions to reaction-diffusion processes. We note that since β>0\beta >0 the process is super-diffusive, which is also reflected at large transverse momentum where the scaling distribution exhibits a heavy tail k42βk_\perp^{4-2\beta } akin to L\'{e}vy random walks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.12041,
  title  = {Anomalous diffusion in QCD matter},
  author = {Paul Caucal and Yacine Mehtar-Tani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12041},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, 3 supplemental materials

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:18:05.886Z