Heavy quark diffusion in QCD and 𝒩 = 4 SYM at next-to-leading order

Abstract

We present the full details of a calculation at next-to-leading order of the momentum diffusion coefficient of a heavy quark in a hot, weakly coupled, QCD plasma. Corrections arise at O(g_s); physically they represent interference between overlapping scatterings, as well as soft, electric scale (p ~ gT) gauge field physics, which we treat using the hard thermal loop (HTL) effective theory. In 3-color, 3-flavor QCD, the momentum diffusion constant of a fundamental representation heavy quark at NLO is kappa = (16\pi/3) alpha_s^2 T^3 (log(1/g) + 0.07428 + 1.9026 g). We extend the computation to a heavy fundamental representation ``probe'' quark in large N_c, N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory, where the result is kappa^{SYM}= (lambda^2 T^3)(6\pi) (log(1/\sqrt{\lambda}) + 0.4304 + 0.8010 \sqrt{lambda}) (where lambda=g_s^2 N_c is the t'Hooft coupling). In the absence of some resummation technique, the convergence of perturbation theory is poor.