Lattice study of a magnetic contribution to heavy quark momentum diffusion

Abstract

Abstract Heavy quarks placed within a hot QCD medium undergo Brownian motion, characterized by specific transport coefficients. Their determination can be simplified by expanding them in T/M, where T is the temperature and M is a heavy quark mass. The leading term in the expansion originates from the colour-electric part of a Lorentz force, whereas the next-to-leading order involves the colour-magnetic part. We measure a colour-magnetic 2-point correlator in quenched QCD at T ∼ (1.2 − 2.0)Tc. Employing multilevel techniques and non-perturbative renormalization, a good signal is obtained, and its continuum extrapolation can be estimated. Modelling the shape of the corresponding spectral function, we subsequently extract the momentum diffusion coefficient, κ. For charm (bottom) quarks, the magnetic contribution adds ∼ 30% (10%) to the electric one. The same increases apply also to the drag coefficient, η. As an aside, the colour-magnetic spectral function is computed at NLO.