Parton energy loss due to synchrotron-like gluon emission

We develop a quasiclassical theory of the synchrotron-like gluon radiation. Our calculations show that the parton energy loss due to the synchrotron gluon emission may be important in the jet quenching phenomenon if the plasma instabilities generate a sufficiently strong chromomagnetic field. Our gluon spectrum disagrees with that obtained by Shuryak and Zahed within the Schwinger's proper time method.Comment: 11 pages, 3 eps figure

QCD Splitting/Joining Functions at Finite Temperature in the Deep LPM Regime

There exist full leading-order-in-alpha_s numerical calculations of the rates for massless quarks and gluons to split and join in the background of a quark-gluon plasma through hard, nearly collinear bremsstrahlung and inverse bremsstrahlung. In the limit of partons with very high energy E, where the physics is dominated by the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect, there are also analytic leading-log calculations of these rates, where the logarithm is ln(E/T). We extend those analytic calculations to next-to-leading-log order. We find agreement with the full result to within roughly 20% for E(less) >~ 10 T, where E(less) is the energy of the least energetic parton in the splitting/joining process. We also discuss how to account for the running of the coupling constant in the case that E/T is very large. Our results are also applicable to isotropic non-equilibrium plasmas if the plasma does not change significantly over the formation time associated with particle splitting.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures. Changes from v3: Typos fixed in the subscripts of various Casimir factor

Photon splitting in a laser field

Photon splitting due to vacuum polarization in a laser field is considered. Using an operator technique, we derive the amplitudes for arbitrary strength, spectral content and polarization of the laser field. The case of a monochromatic circularly polarized laser field is studied in detail and the amplitudes are obtained as three-fold integrals. The asymptotic behavior of the amplitudes for various limits of interest are investigated also in the case of a linearly polarized laser field. Using the obtained results, the possibility of experimental observation of the process is discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figure

Energy loss in perturbative QCD

We review the properties of energetic parton propagation in hot or cold QCD matter, as obtained in recent works. Advances in understanding the energy loss - collisional and radiative - are summarized, with emphasis on the latter: it features very interesting properties which may help to detect the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy ion collisions. We describe two different theoretical approaches, which lead to the same radiated gluon energy spectrum. The case of a longitudinally expanding QCD plasma is investigated. The energy lost by a jet with given opening angle is calculated in view of making predictions for the suppression (quenching) of hard jet production. Phenomenological implications for the difference between hot and cold matter are discussed. Numerical estimates of the loss suggest that it may be significantly enhanced in hot compared to cold matter.Comment: 49 pages latex file with 11 embedded PS figures. Uses ar.sty (included), one equation revised. submitted to Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Scienc

Damping rates for moving particles in hot QCD

Using a program of perturbative resummation I compute the damping rates for fields at nonzero spatial momentum to leading order in weak coupling in hot $QCD$. Sum rules for spectral densities are used to simplify the calculations. For massless fields the damping rate has an apparent logarithmic divergence in the infrared limit, which is cut off by the screening of static magnetic fields (``magnetic mass''). This demonstrates how at high temperature even perturbative quantities are sensitive to nonperturbative phenomenon.Comment: LaTeX file, 24 pages, BNL-P-1/92 (December, 1992

Comment on ``High Temperature Fermion Propagator -- Resummation and Gauge Dependence of the Damping Rate''

Baier et al. have reported the damping rate of long-wavelength fermionic excitations in high-temperature QED and QCD to be gauge-fixing-dependent even within the resummation scheme due to Braaten and Pisarski. It is shown that this problem is caused by the singular nature of the on-shell expansion of the fermion self-energy in the infra-red. Its regularization reveals that the alleged gauge dependence pertains to the residue rather than the pole of the fermion propagator, so that in particular the damping constant comes out gauge-independent, as it should.Comment: 5 page

Phenomenology of Jet Quenching in Heavy Ion Collisions

We derive an analytical expression for the quenching factor in the strong quenching limit where the $p_T$ spectrum of hard partons is dominated by surface emission. We explore the phenomenological consequences of different scaling laws for the energy loss and calculate the additional suppression of the away-side jet.Comment: Substantially modified manuscrip

Certainly Unsupervisable States

This paper proposes an abstraction method for compositional synthesis. Synthesis is a method to automatically compute a control program or supervisor that restricts the behaviour of a given system to ensure safety and liveness. Compositional synthesis uses repeated abstraction and simplification to combat the state-space explosion problem for large systems. The abstraction method proposed in this paper finds and removes the so-called certainly unsupervisable states. By removing these states at an early stage, the final state space can be reduced substantially. The paper describes an algorithm with cubic time complexity to compute the largest possible set of removable states. A practical example demonstrates the feasibility of the method to solve real-world problems

Damping Rate of a Hard Photon in a Relativistic Plasma

The damping rate of a hard photon in a hot relativistic QED and QCD plasma is calculated using the resummation technique by Braaten and Pisarski.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, 2 figures (not included), UGI-MT-94-0

Limits on Low Energy Photon-Photon Scattering from an Experiment on Magnetic Vacuum Birefringence

Experimental bounds on induced vacuum magnetic birefringence can be used to improve present photon-photon scattering limits in the electronvolt energy range. Measurements with the PVLAS apparatus (E. Zavattini {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. D {\bf77} (2008) 032006) at both $\lambda = 1064$ nm and 532 nm lead to bounds on the parameter {\it A$_{e}$}, describing non linear effects in QED, of $A_{e}^{(1064)} < 6.6\cdot10^{-21}$ T$^{-2}$ @ 1064 nm and $A_{e}^{(532)} < 6.3\cdot10^{-21}$ T$^{-2}$ @ 532 nm, respectively, at 95% confidence level, compared to the predicted value of $A_{e}=1.32\cdot10^{-24}$ T$^{-2}$. The total photon-photon scattering cross section may also be expressed in terms of $A_e$, setting bounds for unpolarized light of $\sigma_{\gamma\gamma}^{(1064)} < 4.6\cdot10^{-62}$ m$^{2}$ and $\sigma_{\gamma\gamma}^{(532)} < 2.7\cdot10^{-60}$ m$^{2}$. Compared to the expected QED scattering cross section these results are a factor of $\simeq2\cdot10^{7}$ higher and represent an improvement of a factor about 500 on previous bounds based on ellipticity measurements and of a factor of about $10^{10}$ on bounds based on direct stimulated scattering measurements