The form of the elastic energy loss probability distribution in a static medium

Abstract

We examine the probability distributions P(E,t) of the energy of a hard parton traveling in a partonic medium of constant density for a time t while undergoing elastic 2-to-2 pQCD interactions using a Monte-Carlo model. The form of these distributions is found to be non-Gaussian, confirming results by other groups with similarly detailed models and challenging the validity of the widely used diffusion approximation in elastic energy loss modeling.