Momentum Dependence of Heavy Quark Diffusion in a Thermal Gluonic Plasma on the Lattice

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a heavy quark in a thermal plasma consisting of non-perturbatively interacting soft momentum gluons at high temperatures, described in terms of an effective theory of QCD. Discretizing this effective field theory on a three-dimensional lattice, we propose a numerical strategy that allows us to simulate the dynamics of a heavy quark for different values of initial momenta and for a wide temperature range, higher than $480$ MeV. This allows us, for the first time, to extract the momentum dependence of the heavy quark drag and diffusion coefficients in a non-perturbatively interacting thermal, non-Abelian plasma.

v2; few typos corrected; figures updated