Quark Propagation in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions behaves as a nearly ideal fluid. That behavior may be understood if the quark and antiquark mean-free- paths are very small in the system, leading to a "sticky molasses" description of the plasma, as advocated by the Stony Brook group. This behavior may be traced to the fact that there are relatively low-energy $q\bar{q}$ resonance states in the plasma leading to very large scattering lengths for the quarks. These resonances have been found in lattice simulation of QCD using the maximum entropy method (MEM). We have used a chiral quark model, which provides a simple representation of effects due to instanton dynamics, to study the resonances obtained using the MEM scheme. In the present work we use our model to study the optical potential of a quark in the quark-gluon plasma and calculate the quark mean-free-path. Our results represent a specific example of the dynamics of the plasma as described by the Stony Brook group.

arXiv comment17 pages, 4 figures, revtex4

References in corpus (6)

• A Lattice Calculation of Thermal Dilepton Rates
• Hadron correlators, spectral functions and thermal dilepton rates from lattice QCD
• Meson Spectral Functions at finite Temperature
• Calculation of Temperature-Dependent Hadronic Correlation Functions of Pseudoscalar and Vector Currents
• Comparison of Temperature-Dependent Hadronic Current Correlation Functions Calculated in Lattice Simulations of QCD and with a Chiral Lagrangian Model
• Calculation of the Pseudoscalar-Isoscalar Hadronic Current Correlation Functions of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Thermalization of Heavy Quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Influence of hadronic bound states above $T_c$ on heavy-quark observables in Pb+Pb collisions at at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
• Hadronic Modes and Quark Properties in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Comparison of Models of Critical Opacity in the Quark-Gluon Plasma