Continuum estimate of the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient κ

Abstract

Among quantities playing a central role in the theoretical interpretation of heavy ion collision experiments at RHIC and LHC are so-called transport coefficients. Out of those heavy quark diffusion coefficients play an important role e.g. for the analysis of the quenching of jets containing c or b quarks (D or B mesons) as observed at RHIC and LHC [1]. We report on a lattice investigation of heavy quark momentum diffusion within pure SU(3) plasma above the deconfinement transition with the quarks treated to leading order in the heavy mass expansion. We measure the relevant “colour-electric” Euclidean correlator and based on several lattice spacings perform the continuum extrapolation. This extends our previous studies [2], [3] progressing towards a removal of lattice artifacts and a physical interpretation of the results. We find that the correlation function clearly exceeds its perturbative counterpart which suggests that at temperatures just above the critical one, non-perturbative interactions felt by the heavy quarks are stronger than within the weak-coupling expansion. Using an Ansatz for the spectral function which includes NNLO perturbative contributions we were able to determine, for the first time, a continuum estimate for the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient.