Jet quenching from the lattice

TL;DR

This study uses lattice simulations of electrostatic QCD to quantify the soft contributions to jet quenching in the quark-gluon plasma, revealing significant effects at temperatures relevant to experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice-based method to extract soft mode contributions to jet quenching from gauge-invariant operators in a dimensionally reduced effective theory.

Findings

Soft contributions to the jet quenching parameter are large at accessible temperatures.

Results are compared with phenomenological models and holographic computations.

Lattice approach enables non-perturbative study of real-time phenomena in QCD.

Abstract

We present a lattice study of the momentum broadening experienced by a hard parton in the quark-gluon plasma. In particular, the contributions to this real-time phenomenon from soft modes are extracted from a set of gauge-invariant operators in a dimensionally reduced effective theory (electrostatic QCD), which can be simulated on a Euclidean lattice. At the temperatures accessible to present experiments, the soft contributions to the jet quenching parameter are found to be quite large. We compare our results to phenomenological models and to holographic computations.