Radiative heavy quark energy loss in a dynamical QCD medium

Abstract

The computation of radiative energy loss in a dynamically screened QCD medium is a key ingredient in obtaining reliable predictions for jet quenching in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. We calculate, to first order in the opacity, the energy loss suffered by a heavy quark traveling through an infinite and time-independent QCD medium and show that the result for a dynamical medium is almost twice that obtained previously for a medium consisting of randomly distributed static scattering centers. A quantitative description of jet suppression in experiments conducted at the BNL Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and CERN Large Hadron Collider thus must correctly account for the dynamics of the medium's constituents.