The collisional energy loss of a heavy-quark in a semi-quark-gluon plasma

Qianqian Du, Mudong Du, Yun Guo

Published 2024-02-28Version 1

By utilizing a background field effective theory, we compute the collisional energy loss of a heavy-quark moving through a semi-quark-gluon plasma characterized by nontrivial holonomy for Polyakov loops. We consider the elastic scatterings between the incident heavy-quark and the thermal partons with both hard and soft momentum transfers. Our results show that the heavy-quark energy loss is significantly suppressed in the semi-quark-gluon plasma due to a background field that is self-consistently generated in the effective theory. On the other hand, the suppression strongly depends on the temperature of the plasma which becomes negligible above 2~3 times the critical temperature. For a realistic coupling constant, ignoring a relatively weak dependence on the heavy-quark velocity, the suppression on the collisional energy loss can be approximated by an overall factor determined solely by the background field.