Drag and Diffusion of Heavy Quarks in a hot and anisotropic QCD medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates how momentum anisotropy in a hot QCD medium affects the drag and diffusion of heavy quarks, revealing that anisotropy reduces these coefficients and introduces angular dependence.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of momentum anisotropy on heavy quark transport coefficients in a hot QCD medium, highlighting the angular dependence and reduction effects.

Findings

Anisotropy reduces both drag and diffusion coefficients.

Angular dependence causes coefficients to inflate when moving transverse to anisotropy.

Study enhances understanding of heavy quark dynamics in anisotropic quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

The propagation of heavy quarks (HQs) in a medium was quite often modeled by the Fokker-Plank (FP) equation. Since the transport coefficients, related to drag and diffusion processes are the main ingredients in the FP equation, the evolution of HQs is thus effectively controlled by them. At the initial stage of the relativistic heavy ion collisions, asymptotic weak-coupling causes the free-streaming motions of partons in the beam direction and the expansion in transverse directions are almost frozen, hence an anisotropy in the momentum space sets in. Since HQs are too produced in the same time therefore the study of the effect of momentum anisotropy on the drag and diffusion coefficients becomes advertently desirable. In this article we have thus studied the drag and diffusion of HQs in the anisotropic medium and found that the presence of the anisotropy reduces both drag and diffusion coefficients. In addition, the anisotropy introduces an angular dependence to both the drag and diffusion coefficients, as a result both coefficients get inflated when the partons are moving transverse to the direction of anisotropy than parallel to the direction of anisotropy.