The evolving distribution of hard partons traversing a hot strongly interacting plasma

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the momentum distribution of high-energy partons changes as they pass through quark-gluon plasma, incorporating detailed leading order transition rates for both bremsstrahlung and collisions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of parton energy loss in plasma using complete leading order transition rates, improving upon previous approximate methods.

Findings

Significant modification of momentum distribution with detailed rates

Comparison shows differences from approximate collisional energy loss models

Highlights importance of including full transition rates in modeling

Abstract

We present results for the evolution of the momentum distribution of a hard parton traversing a brick of quark-gluon plasma, considering both bremsstrahlung and collisional energy loss. The complete leading order transition rates are included. We find a significant modification of the evolving momentum distribution compared to results obtained by employing an approximate implementation of the collisional energy loss that uses the mean energy loss, together with momentum diffusion.