Radiative and Collisional Jet Energy Loss in a Quark-Gluon Plasma

We calculate radiative and collisional energy loss of hard partons traversing the quark-gluon plasma created at RHIC and compare the respective size of these contributions. We employ the AMY formalism for radiative energy loss and include additionally energy loss by elastic collisions. Our treatment of both processes is complete at leading order in the coupling, and accounts for the probabilistic nature of jet energy loss. We find that a solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for the probability density distributions of partons is necessary for a complete calculation of the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for pion production in heavy ion collisions. It is found that the magnitude of $R_{AA}$ is sensitive to the inclusion of both collisional and radiative energy loss, while the average energy is less affected by the addition of collisional contributions. We present a calculation of $R_{AA}$ for $\pi^0$ at RHIC, combining our energy loss formalism with a relativistic (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamic description of the thermalized medium.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contributed to Quark Matter 2008, Jaipur, Indi

Effective theories for real-time correlations in hot plasmas

We discuss the sequence of effective theories needed to understand the qualitative, and quantitative, behavior of real-time correlators in ultra-relativistic plasmas. We analyze in detail the case where A is a gauge-invariant conserved current. This case is of interest because it includes a correlation recently measured in lattice simulations of classical, hot, SU(2)-Higgs gauge theory. We find that simple perturbation theory, free kinetic theory, linearized kinetic theory, and hydrodynamics are all needed to understand the correlation for different ranges of time. We emphasize how correlations generically have power-law decays at very large times due to non-linear couplings to long-lived hydrodynamic modes.Comment: 28 pages, Latex, uses revtex, epsf macro packages [Revised version: t -> sqrt{t} in a few typos on p. 10.

Electromagnetic Emission and Energy Loss in the QGP

I discuss why photon production from the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) presents an interesting problem, both experimentally and theoretically. I show how the photon emission rate can be computed under the simplifying assumption that the QGP fully thermalizes. The theoretical issues are very similar to those for jet energy loss; so it should be possible to treat them in a common formalism and relate the predictions of one phenomenon to those of the other.Comment: 8 pages, invited talk at Quark Matter 200

Radiative and Collisional Energy Loss, and Photon-Tagged Jets at RHIC

The suppression of single jets at high transverse momenta in a quark-gluon plasma is studied at RHIC energies, and the additional information provided by a photon tag is included. The energy loss of hard jets traversing through the medium is evaluated in the AMY formalism, by consistently taking into account the contributions from radiative events and from elastic collisions at leading order in the coupling. The strongly-interacting medium in these collisions is modelled with (3+1)-dimensional ideal relativistic hydrodynamics. Putting these ingredients together with a complete set of photon-production processes, we present a calculation of the nuclear modification of single jets and photon-tagged jets at RHIC.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contributed to the 3rd International Conference on Hard and Electro-Magnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2008), typos corrected, published versio

Transport coefficients in high temperature gauge theories: (II) Beyond leading log

Results are presented of a full leading-order evaluation of the shear viscosity, flavor diffusion constants, and electrical conductivity in high temperature QCD and QED. The presence of Coulomb logarithms associated with gauge interactions imply that the leading-order results for transport coefficients may themselves be expanded in an infinite series in powers of 1/log(1/g); the utility of this expansion is also examined. A next-to-leading-log approximation is found to approximate the full leading-order result quite well as long as the Debye mass is less than the temperature.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure

The Holographic Dark Energy in a Non-flat Universe

We study the model for holographic dark energy in a spatially closed universe, generalizing the proposal in hep-th/0403127 for a flat universe. We provide independent arguments for the choice of the parameter $c=1$ in the holographic dark energy model. On the one hand, $c$ can not be less than 1, to avoid violating the second law of thermodynamics. On the other hand, observation suggests $c$ be very close to 1, it is hard to justify a small deviation of $c$ from 1, if $c>1$.Comment: 12 pages, harvmac, v2: order of authors is corrected in webpage, v3: refs. adde

Transport coefficients from the 2PI effective action

We show that the lowest nontrivial truncation of the two-particle irreducible (2PI) effective action correctly determines transport coefficients in a weak coupling or 1/N expansion at leading (logarithmic) order in several relativistic field theories. In particular, we consider a single real scalar field with cubic and quartic interactions in the loop expansion, the O(N) model in the 2PI-1/N expansion, and QED with a single and many fermion fields. Therefore, these truncations will provide a correct description, to leading (logarithmic) order, of the long time behavior of these systems, i.e. the approach to equilibrium. This supports the promising results obtained for the dynamics of quantum fields out of equilibrium using 2PI effective action techniques.Comment: 5 pages, explanation in introduction expanded, summary added; to appear in PR

Divergences in Real-Time Classical Field Theories at Non-Zero Temperature

The classical approximation provides a non-perturbative approach to time-dependent problems in finite temperature field theory. We study the divergences in hot classical field theory perturbatively. At one-loop, we show that the linear divergences are completely determined by the classical equivalent of the hard thermal loops in hot quantum field theories, and that logarithmic divergences are absent. To deal with higher-loop diagrams, we present a general argument that the superficial degree of divergence of classical vertex functions decreases by one with each additional loop: one-loop contributions are superficially linearly divergent, two-loop contributions are superficially logarithmically divergent, and three- and higher-loop contributions are superficially finite. We verify this for two-loop SU(N) self-energy diagrams in Feynman and Coulomb gauges. We argue that hot, classical scalar field theory may be completely renormalized by local (mass) counterterms, and discuss renormalization of SU(N) gauge theories.Comment: 31 pages with 7 eps figure