New Developments on Heavy Quark Thermalization in Quark-gluon Plasma

by Bruno Scheihing-Hitschfeld (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics /University of California)

Thursday Oct 2, 2025, 2:15 PM → 3:45 PM Europe/Berlin

D6-135 (UHG)

The dynamics of heavy particles propagating through thermal environments has been a topic of interest in theoretical physics since (at least) the times of Einstein's theory of Brownian motion. Nowadays, the simultaneous production of heavy quarks and quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collision experiments provides an ideal configuration in which to test and extend our understanding of this process in relativistic settings — and, rather uniquely, in terms of the fundamental degrees of freedom of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Over the past two decades, the heavy quark diffusion coefficient — the essential ingredient for the definition of a (Gaussian) stochastic process characterizing the in-medium evolution of heavy quarks — has been studied extensively. However, less attention has been given to the non-Gaussian features of the momentum transfer between heavy quarks and quark-gluon plasma and their consequences for heavy quark transport. In this talk, I will show how these features are, in fact, essential in order to understand the kinetic equilibration process of heavy quarks. As an example, I will discuss the case of a strongly coupled N = 4 Yang-Mills thermal environment, where we recently obtained explicit, analytic results for the momentum transfer probability with all of its non-Gaussian features. To conclude, I will show the phenomenological prospects of the approach we have introduced.

 

2025-10-02_Scheihing-Hitschfeld_Bruno.pdf