Heavy quark diffusion in perturbative QCD at next-to-leading order.
We compute the momentum diffusion coefficient of a heavy quark in a hot QCD plasma, to next-to-leading order in the weak-coupling expansion. Corrections arise at [see formula]; physically they represent interference between overlapping scatterings, as well as soft, electric scale (p approximately gT) gauge field physics, which we treat using the hard thermal loop effective theory. In 3-color, 3-flavor QCD, the momentum diffusion constant of a fundamental representation heavy quark at next-to-leading order is kappa = 16pi/3alpha(s)(2)T(3)(ln1/g(s)+0.07428+1.9026 g(s)). The convergence of the perturbative expansion is poor.
Caron-Huot
Simon
S
Physics Department, McGill University, 3600 rue University, Montréal, QC H3A 2T8, Canada.
Moore
Guy D
GD