Heavy quark collisional energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma including finite relaxation time

Abstract

In this paper, we calculate the soft-collisional energy loss of heavy quarks traversing the viscous quarkgluon plasma including the effects of a finite relaxation time τπ on the energy loss. We find that the collisional energy loss depends appreciably on τπ. In particular, for typical values of the viscosity-toentropy ratio, we show that the energy loss obtained using τπ ≠ 0 can be ∼10% larger than the one obtained using τπ ¼ 0. Moreover, we find that the energy loss obtained using the kinetic theory expression for τπ is much larger than the one obtained with the τπ derived from the anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence. Our results may be relevant in the modeling of heavy quark evolution through the quarkgluon plasma.