Accounting for plasma constituent mass effects in heavy fermion energy loss calculations in hot QED and QCD

Abstract

We evaluate the collisional energy loss of a energetic fermion with mass $M$ propagating through a hot QED plasma with temperature $T$, including mass corrections, that is, keeping the mass $m$ of the fermion constituents of the plasma, assuming $m \ll T \ll M$. We use the bare theory to compute the contribution of hard momentum transfer collisions, and the Braaten-Pisarski resummed theory, amended with small mass corrections, for the contribution of low momentum transfer collisions, and compute the mass corrections at leading logarithmic accuracy in the regime where the energy of the heavy fermion obeys $E \ll M^2/T$. We use dimensional regularization to regulate all possible divergences in the computation. If the fermion mass is of order of the soft scale $eT$, where $e$ is the gauge coupling constant, the mass corrections are of the same order as pure perturbative corrections, while they can be substantial for larger values of $m$. We also evaluate the impact of this correction for a QCD plasma.