Energy loss of heavy quarks in the isotropic collisional hot QCD medium

Abstract

Abstract The collisional energy loss of heavy partons (charm and bottom quarks) has been determined within the framework of semi-classical transport theory implying the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook (BGK) collisional kernel. Hot QCD medium effects have been incorporated while employing a quasi-particle description of the medium in terms of effective gluons, quarks and antiquarks with respective temperature dependent effective fugacities. The momentum dependence of the energy loss for the charm and the bottom quark has been investigated. It is observed that with the increase in momentum of the heavy quarks, the loss increases sharply for the smaller values and reaches saturation later. Furthermore, as compared to the charm quark, the bottom quark loses less energy at a particular momentum and collisional frequency. The energy loss is seen to increase with increasing collisional frequency. We also provide a comparative study of the results obtained using the BGK kernel rather than those using the relaxation time approximation (RTA) kernel and found them to be consistent with each other. The medium effects in all the situations are seen to play a quite significant role.