Interplay of soft and hard processes and hadron pTp_T spectra in pApA and AAAA collisions

Motivated by a schematic model of multiple parton scattering within the Glauber formalism, the transverse momentum spectra in $pA$ and $AA$ collisions are analyzed in terms of a nuclear modification factor with respect to $pp$ collisions. The existing data at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) energies are shown to be consistent with the picture of Glauber multiple scattering in which the interplay between soft and hard processes and the effect of absorptive processes lead to nontrivial nuclear modification of the particle spectra. Relative to the additive model of incoherent hard scattering, the spectra are enhanced at large $p_T$ (hard) by multiple scattering while suppressed at low $p_T$ (soft) by absorptive correction with the transition occurring at around a scale $p_0\sim 1-2$ GeV/$c$ that separates soft and hard processes. Around the same scale, the $p_T$ spectra in $pp$ collisions also change from an exponential form at low $p_T$ to a power-law behavior at high $p_T$. At very large $p_T\gg p_0$, the nuclear enhancement is shown to decrease like $1/p_T^2$. Implications of these nuclear effects on the study of jet quenching, parton thermalization and collective radial flow in high-energy $AA$ collisions are discussed.Comment: 9 pages in Revtex, 7 eps figure

Nonperturbative calculation of the shear viscosity in hot phi**4 theory in real time

Starting from the Kubo formula we calculate the shear viscosity in hot phi**4 theory nonperturbatively by resumming ladders with a real-time version of the Bethe-Salpeter equation at finite temperature. In the weak coupling limit, the generalized Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem is shown to decouple the Bethe-Salpeter equations for the different real-time components of the 4-point function. The resulting scalar integral equation is identical with the one obtained by Jeon using diagrammatic ``cutting rules'' in the Imaginary Time Formalism.Comment: 4 pages LateX. The 2 postscript figures are now incorporated into the text, facilitating download. No other changes. Accepted by Physics Letters

Heavy Quark Energy Loss in Nuclear Medium

Multiple scattering, modified fragmentation functions and radiative energy loss of a heavy quark propagating in a nuclear medium are investigated in perturbative QCD. Because of the quark mass dependence of the gluon formation time, the medium size dependence of heavy quark energy loss is found to change from a linear to a quadratic form when the initial energy and momentum scale are increased relative to the quark mass. The radiative energy loss is also significantly suppressed relative to a light quark due to the suppression of collinear gluon emission by a heavy quark.Comment: 4 pages in Revtex, 3 figure