On multiple scatterings of mesons in hot and cold QCD matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how meson pairs propagate through hot and cold QCD matter, analyzing multiple scattering effects and their implications for quarkonium survival, heavy meson production, and vector meson creation in nuclear environments.

Contribution

It provides a unified analysis of meson scattering in hot and cold QCD matter using saturation models, highlighting the suppression of inelastic scattering effects and their phenomenological implications.

Findings

Elastic and inelastic scatterings yield similar results when expressed via saturation momentum.

Inelastic scattering effects are suppressed by 1/N_c^2 compared to elastic.

Results have implications for quarkonium survival and meson production in nuclear collisions.

Abstract

We study the propagation of a color singlet q\bar{q} pair undergoing multiple scatterings in hot and cold QCD matter. The interaction of the dipole with the nucleus or plasma is described with the McLerran-Venugopalan and Gyulassy-Wang models respectively. We find identical results when expressed in terms of the saturation momentum of either the nucleus or the plasma. We compare two kinds of multiple scatterings, elastic and inelastic with respect to the target. When allowing the target to scatter inelastically, the difference with the elastic case is suppressed by a 1/N^2_c factor. We also discuss some implications of our results in the following situations: the survival probability of quarkonia in a hot medium, the production of high-p_T heavy mesons in nucleus-nucleus collisions, and the production of vector mesons in deep inelastic scattering off nuclei.