Gluon radiation by heavy quarks at intermediate energies

TL;DR

This paper uses scalar QCD to analyze gluon radiation by heavy quarks at intermediate energies, providing approximation formulas and comparing with full QCD results, revealing less suppression in small transverse momentum emission.

Contribution

It introduces approximation formulas for gluon emission in scalar QCD and justifies its use as a good approximation for heavy quark energy loss at intermediate energies.

Findings

Scalar QCD reproduces Gunion-Bertsch results at high energies.

Emission at small transverse momentum is less suppressed than previously thought.

Finite gluon mass influences the emission characteristics.

Abstract

Employing scalar QCD we study the gluon emission of heavy quarks created by the interaction with light quarks considered as dynamical scattering centers. We develop approximation formulas for the high energy limit and study when the full calculation reaches this high energy limit. For zero quark masses and in the high energy limit our model reproduces the Gunion-Bertsch results. We justify why scalar QCD represents a good approximation to the full QCD approach for the energy loss of heavy quarks. In the regime of accessible phenomenology we observe that the emission at small transverse momentum (dead cone effect) is less suppressed than originally suggested. We also investigate the influence of a finite gluon mass on the discussed results.