Heavy Quark Energy Loss in a Nuclear Medium

2003/09/16 by Ben-Wei Zhang, Enke Wang, Xin-Nian Wang · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.93.072301

published as Phys.Rev.Lett.93:072301,2004 · 4 pages in Revtex, 3 figures

arxiv created 2003/09/16 · openalex publication_date 2004/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Multiple scattering, modified fragmentation functions, and radiative energy loss of a heavy-quark propagating in a nuclear medium are investigated in perturbative QCD. Because of the quark mass dependence of the gluon formation time, the medium size dependence of heavy-quark energy loss is found to change from a linear to a quadratic form when the initial energy and momentum scale are increased relative to the quark mass. The radiative energy loss is also significantly suppressed relative to a light quark due to the suppression of collinear gluon emission by a heavy quark.

Citations

• Radiative energy loss of high energy quarks and gluons in a finite volume quark-gluon plasma
• Fully quantum treatment of the Landau--Pomeranchuk--Migdal effect in QED and QCD
• Gluon Radiation off Hard Quarks in a Nuclear Environment: Opacity Expansion

Cited by

• Light-cone wave function approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in QCD matter
• Toward an understanding of the single electron data measured at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
• Multiple parton scattering in nuclei: Quark–quark scattering
• Color coherence in a heavy quark antenna radiating gluons inside a QCD medium