Drag and diffusion co-efficients of heavy quarks in hard thermal loop approximations

TL;DR

This paper calculates the drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy quarks in quark-gluon plasma using HTL approximations, revealing significant differences from previous methods and discussing their impact on heavy ion collision phenomenology.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive HTL-based calculation of transport coefficients, including corrections at both propagators and vertices, improving accuracy over earlier approaches.

Findings

Transport coefficients are significantly altered by HTL corrections.

Inclusion of vertex corrections impacts the magnitude of coefficients.

Results influence interpretations of heavy ion collision experiments.

Abstract

The drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy quarks propagating through quark gluon plasma (QGP) have been evaluated using Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) approximations. The HTL corrections to the relevant propagators and vertices have been considered. It is observed that the magnitudes of both the transport coefficients are changed significantly from values obtained by earlier approaches where either (i) the $t$ channel divergence in T=0 pQCD matrix element is shielded simply by Debye mass. or (ii) only HTL resummed propagator is used ignoring the HTL corrections at the interaction vertices. The implications of these changes in the transport coefficients on the heavy ion phenomenology have been discussed.