Heavy-quark diffusion in 2+1D and Glasma-like plasmas: evidence of a transport peak

Abstract

We examine how plasma excitations affect the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient in 2+1 dimensional and Glasma-like plasmas, akin to the pre-equilibrium matter describing relativistic heavy-ion collisions at early times. We find that the transport coefficient $2\kappa$ transverse to and ${\kappa }_z$ along the beam direction display a qualitatively different evolution. We attribute this to the underlying excitation spectra of these systems, thus providing evidence for the existence of non-perturbative properties in the spectrum. This is accomplished by first reconstructing the diffusion coefficients using gauge-fixed correlation functions, which accurately reproduces the time evolution of $2\kappa$ and ${\kappa }_z$. We then modify these excitation spectra to study the impact of their non-perturbative features on the transport coefficients. In particular, we find evidence for a novel transport peak in the low-frequency spectrum that is crucial for heavy-quark diffusion. We also demonstrate that gluonic excitations are broad while scalar excitations associated with ${\kappa }_z$ are narrow and strongly enhanced at low momenta. Our findings indicate that the large values and dynamical properties of transport coefficients in the Glasma could originate from genuinely non-perturbative features in the spectrum.

Comments: 21 pages, 12 figures, 1 table; v2: minor revision, published version, data and plot files available under reference [49] (https://zenodo.org/records/14039178)