Heavy Quark Diffusion in Strong Magnetic Fields at Weak Coupling and Implications for Elliptic Flow

TL;DR

This paper calculates how heavy quarks diffuse in strong magnetic fields relevant for heavy ion collisions, revealing anisotropic diffusion effects that could explain observed elliptic flow patterns.

Contribution

It provides the first leading-order calculations of heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficients in strong magnetic fields, highlighting anisotropic effects and their implications for elliptic flow.

Findings

Perpendicular diffusion coefficient scales as $ angle ext{alpha}_s^2 T eB$

Parallel diffusion coefficient receives contributions from gluons and quark mass effects

Anisotropic diffusion can generate significant elliptic flow without full thermalization

Abstract

We compute the momentum diffusion coefficients of heavy quarks, $\kappa_\parallel$ and $\kappa_\perp$, in a strong magnetic field $B$ along the directions parallel and perpendicular to $B$, respectively, at the leading order in QCD coupling constant $\alpha_s$. We consider a regime relevant for the relativistic heavy ion collisions, $\alpha_s eB\ll T^2\ll eB$, so that thermal excitations of light quarks are restricted to the lowest Landau level (LLL) states. In the vanishing light-quark mass limit, we find $\kappa_\perp^{\rm LO}\propto \alpha_s^2 T eB$ in the leading order that arises from screened Coulomb scatterings with (1+1)-dimensional LLL quarks, while $\kappa_\parallel$ gets no contribution from the scatterings with LLL quarks due to kinematic restrictions. We show that the first non-zero leading order contributions to $\kappa_\parallel^{\rm LO}$ come from the two separate effects: 1) the screened Coulomb scatterings with thermal gluons, and 2) a finite light-quark mass $m_q$. The former leads to $\kappa_\parallel^{\rm LO,\,gluon} \propto \alpha_s^2 T^3$ and the latter to $\kappa_\parallel^{\rm LO,\,massive}\propto \alpha_s (\alpha_s eB)^{1/2} m_q^2$. Based on our results, we propose a new scenario for the large value of heavy-quark elliptic flow observed in RHIC and LHC. Namely, when $\kappa_\perp\gg\kappa_\parallel$, an anisotropy in drag forces gives rise to a sizable amount of the heavy-quark elliptic flow even if heavy quarks do not fully belong to an ellipsoidally expanding background fluid.