Phenomenology of elastic energy loss
- Department of Physics, P. O. Box 35, University of Jyvaeskylae, FI-40014 (Finland)
The unexpectedly strong suppression of high p{sub T} heavy quarks in heavy-ion collisions has given rise to the idea that partons propagating through a medium in addition to energy loss by induced radiation also undergo substantial energy loss due to elastic collisions. However, the precise magnitude of this elastic energy-loss component is highly controversial. Although for a parton inside a medium it is surprisingly difficult to define the difference between elastic and radiative processes rigorously, the main phenomenological difference is in the dependence of energy loss on in-medium path length: in a constant medium radiative energy loss is expected to grow quadratically with path length, elastic energy loss linearly. In this article, we investigate a class of energy-loss models with such a linear path-length dependence and demonstrate that they are incompatible with measured data on hard hadronic back-to-back correlations where a substantial variation of path length is probed. This indicates that any elastic energy-loss component has to be small.
- OSTI ID:
- 21067995
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. C, Nuclear Physics, Vol. 76, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.76.064905; (c) 2007 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2813
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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