QCD COLLISIONAL ENERGY LOSS IN AN INCREASINGLY INTERACTING QUARK–GLUON PLASMA

Abstract

The discovery of the jet quenching in central Au + Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has provided clear evidence for the formation of strongly interacting dense matter. It has been predicted to occur due to the energy loss of high energy partons that propagate through the quark–gluon plasma. In this paper we investigate the dependence of the parton energy loss due to elastic scatterings in a parton plasma on the value of the strong coupling and its running with the evolution of the system. We analyze different prescriptions for the QCD coupling and calculate the energy and length dependence of the fractional energy loss. Moreover, the partonic quenching factor for light and heavy quarks is estimated. We found that the predicted enhancement of the heavy to light hadrons (D/π) ratio is strongly dependent on the running of the QCD coupling constant.