Abstract
.The quark-gluon plasma, which is produced at an early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, is expected to be initially strongly populated with chromodynamic fields. We address the question of how heavy quarks interact with such a turbulent plasma in comparison with an equilibrated one of the same energy density. For this purpose we derive a Fokker-Planck transport equation of heavy quarks embedded in a plasma of light quarks and gluons. We first discuss the equilibrium plasma and then the turbulent one applying the same approach, where the heavy quarks interact not with the plasma constituents but rather with the long wavelength classical fields. We first consider the three schematic models of isotropic trubulent plasma and then the simplified model of glasma with the chromodynamic fields only along the beam direction. The momentum broadening and collisional energy loss of a test heavy quark are computed and compared to those of the equilibrium plasma of the same energy density.
Highlights
The early stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is the least known because there are hardly any experimentally accessible signals of the phase
One expects that the quark-gluon plasma, which is produced in the collisions, is initially strongly populated with chromodynamic fields
Within the framework of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) approach, see e.g. the review [1], color charges of partons confined in the colliding nuclei act as sources of long wavelength chromodynamic fields which can be treated classically because of large occupation numbers of the soft modes
Summary
The early stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is the least known because there are hardly any experimentally accessible signals of the phase. The effect, is not that impressive at a realistic value of the coupling constant Because of their big masses, relaxation times of heavy quarks, which are produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are expected to be significantly longer than those of light quarks and gluons. More generally, a stationary state is reached by light quarks and gluons, heavy quarks need some extra time to adjust to the state of the plasma Such a situation is naturally described in terms of the Fokker-Planck transport equation which was repeatedly applied to heavy quarks in [5,6,7,8]. Postulating a form of the correlation functions of chromodynamic fields, we derive the coefficients of the Fokker-Planck equation which can be related to the energy loss, momentum broadening and diffusion coefficient of heavy quarks in the plasma.
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