Parton energy loss in a hard-soft factorized approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model for parton energy loss in quark-gluon plasma that combines stochastic soft interactions with rate-based hard scatterings, improving understanding of energy loss mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents a novel hard-soft factorized model that integrates stochastic and rate-based approaches, with a scale to determine the validity of the stochastic description.

Findings

The model effectively describes energy and fermion-number cascades.

A scale is introduced to estimate the regime of validity for the stochastic approach.

The approach enhances understanding of parton energy loss at different coupling strengths.

Abstract

An energetic parton travelling through a quark-gluon plasma loses energy via occasional hard scatterings and frequent softer interactions. Whether or not these interactions admit a perturbative description, the effect of the soft interactions can be factorized and encoded in a small number of transport coefficients. In this work, we present a hard-soft factorized parton energy loss model which combines a stochastic description of soft interactions and rate-based modelling of hard scatterings. We introduce a scale to estimate the regime of validity of the stochastic description, allowing for a better understanding of the model's applicability at small and large coupling. We study the energy and fermion-number cascade of energetic partons as an application of the model.