Form of the elastic energy-loss probability distribution in a static medium

Abstract

We examine the probability distributions $P(E,t)$ of the energy of a hard parton traveling in a partonic medium of constant density for a time $t$ while undergoing elastic 2 $\ensuremath{\rightarrow}$ 2 perturbative QCD (pQCD) interactions using a Monte Carlo model. The form of these distributions is found to be non-Gaussian, confirming results by other groups with similarly detailed models and challenging the validity of the widely used diffusion approximation in elastic energy-loss modeling.