Collisional Energy Loss of a Heavy Quark in an Anisotropic Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We compute the leading-order collisional energy loss of a heavy quark propagating through a quark-gluon plasma in which the quark and gluon distributions are anisotropic in momentum space. Following the calculation outlined for QED in an earlier work we indicate the differences encountered in QCD and their effect on the collisional energy loss results. For a 20 GeV bottom quark we show that momentum space anisotropies can result in the collisional heavy quark energy loss varying with the angle of propagation by up to 50%. For low velocity quarks we show that anisotropies result in energy gain instead of energy loss with the energy gain focused in such a way as to accelerate particles along the anisotropy direction thereby reducing the momentum-space anisotropy. The origin of this negative energy loss is explicitly identified as being related to the presence of plasma instabilities in the system.