Parton energy loss in a hard-soft factorized approach

Abstract

An energetic parton travelling through a quark-gluon plasma loses energy via occasional hard scatterings and frequent softer interactions. Whether or not these interactions admit a perturbative description, the effect of the soft interactions can be factorized and encoded in a small number of transport coefficients. In this work, we present a hard-soft factorized parton energy loss model which combines a stochastic description of soft interactions and rate-based modelling of hard scatterings. We introduce a scale to estimate the regime of validity of the stochastic description, allowing for a better understanding of the model's applicability at small and large coupling. We study the energy and fermion-number cascade of energetic partons as an application of the model.

Comments: 25 pages, 21 figures, match published version