Radiative and Collisional Jet Energy Loss in a Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We calculate radiative and collisional energy loss of hard partons traversing the quark-gluon plasma created at RHIC and compare the respective size of these contributions. We employ the AMY formalism for radiative energy loss and include additionally energy loss by elastic collisions. Our treatment of both processes is complete at leading order in the coupling, and accounts for the probabilistic nature of jet energy loss. We find that a solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for the probability density distributions of partons is necessary for a complete calculation of the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for pion production in heavy ion collisions. It is found that the magnitude of $R_{AA}$ is sensitive to the inclusion of both collisional and radiative energy loss, while the average energy is less affected by the addition of collisional contributions. We present a calculation of $R_{AA}$ for ${\pi }^0$ at RHIC, combining our energy loss formalism with a relativistic (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamic description of the thermalized medium.

4 pages, 4 figures, contributed to Quark Matter 2008, Jaipur, India

References in corpus (5)

• Suppression of Hadrons with Large Transverse Momentum in Central Au+Au Collisions at $sqrt {s sub {sub {NN}}}_ = 130 GeV
• Centrality dependence of high pT hadron suppression in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(sNN)=130 GeV
• Photon Emission from Ultrarelativistic Plasmas
• Radiative and Collisional Jet Energy Loss in the Quark-Gluon Plasma at RHIC
• Parton energy loss in an expanding quark-gluon plasma: Radiative vs collisional

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Momentum dependence of drag coefficients and heavy flavour suppression in quark gluon plasma
• Comparing the MARTINI and CUJET models for jet-quenching: Medium modification of jets and jet substructure