Heavy quark scattering and quenching in a QCD medium at finite temperature and chemical potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite temperature and chemical potential in a QCD medium affect heavy quark scattering, energy loss, and transport properties, with implications for heavy-ion collision experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of elastic cross sections and transport coefficients of heavy quarks in a QCD medium at finite temperature and chemical potential, incorporating off-shell effects.

Findings

Elastic cross sections decrease with increasing temperature and chemical potential.

Finite chemical potential amplifies effects at temperatures below the critical temperature.

Transport properties of heavy quarks are highly sensitive to medium conditions.

Abstract

The heavy quark collisional scattering on partons of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) is studied in a QCD medium at finite temperature and chemical potential. We evaluate the effects of finite parton masses and widths, finite temperature $T$ and quark chemical potential $\mu_q$ on the different elastic cross sections for dynamical quasi-particles (on- and off-shell particles in the QGP medium as described by the dynamical quasi-particles model "DQPM") using the leading order Born diagrams. Our results show clearly the decrease of the $qQ$ and $gQ$ total elastic cross sections when the temperature and the quark chemical potential increase. These effects are amplified for finite $\mu_q$ at temperatures lower than the corresponding critical temperature $T_c (\mu_q)$. Using these cross sections we, furthermore, estimate the energy loss and longitudinal and transverse momentum transfers of a heavy quark propagating in a finite temperature and chemical potential medium. Accordingly, we have shown that the transport properties of heavy quarks are sensitive to the temperature and chemical potential variations. Our results provide some basic ingredients for the study of charm physics in heavy-ion collisions at Beam Energy Scan (BES) at RHIC and CBM experiment at FAIR.