Lattice calculation of transport coefficient $\hat{q}$ in pure gluon plasma and (2+1)-flavor QCD plasma

Abstract

The transport coefficient $\hat{q}$ is a leading coefficient that controls the modification of the hard parton traversing QGP, and hence, responsible for the suppression of the high transverse momentum (transverse to the beam direction) charged-hadrons in heavy-ion collisions. In this article, we present the first unquenched lattice QCD calculation of $\hat{q}$. The calculation is carried out using (2+1)-flavor of quarks, using the highly improved staggered quark action (HISQ) and tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action. The calculation is performed in a wide range of temperatures, ranging from 200 MeV $<T<$ 800 MeV using MILC code package. We considered a leading-order process where a hard parton scatters off the glue field of a thermal QCD medium by exchanging a Glauber gluon (whose transverse momentum is larger than its longitudinal components). The hard scale associated with the jet parton allows the coupling of the gluon to that parton to be treated in perturbation theory. The coupling of the gluon to the medium is treated non-perturbatively. This non-perturbative part is expressed in terms of a non-local (two-point) field-strength-field-strength operator product which can be Taylor expanded after analytic continuation to the deep Euclidean region. Such an expansion allows us to write $\hat{q}$ in terms of a series of local operators, which are suppressed by factors of the hard parton energy. The calculated $\hat{q}$ and its temperature dependence demonstrates reasonable agreement with the phenomenological extraction carried out by the JET collaboration.