Heavy Quark Momentum Diffusion Coefficient from Lattice QCD

Abstract

The momentum diffusion coefficient for heavy quarks is studied in a deconfined gluon plasma in the static approximation by investigating a correlation function of the color electric field using Monte Carlo techniques. The diffusion coefficient is extracted from the long distance behavior of such a correlator. For temperatures Tc < T <~ 2 Tc, our nonperturbative estimate of the diffusion coefficient is found to be very different from the leading order perturbation theory, and is in the right ballpark to explain the heavy quark flow seen by PHENIX at RHIC.