Momentum Broadening in an Anisotropic Plasma

Abstract

The rates governing momentum broadening in a quark-gluon plasma with a momentum anisotropy are calculated to leading-log order for a heavy quark using kinetic theory. It is shown how the problematic singularity for these rates at leading-oder is lifted by next-to-leading order gluon self-energy corrections to give a finite contribution to the leading-log result. The resulting rates are shown to lead to larger momentum broadening along the beam axis than in the transverse plane, which is consistent with recent STAR results. This might indicate that the quark-gluon-plasma at RHIC is not in equilibrium.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, uses revtex4; see source for numerics; v2: typos corrected, note added in appendix, matches published versio