Finding the Scatterers in Hot Quark Soup

Abstract

© Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons. We present a brief report on a thought experiment in which an incident energetic parton traverses a brick of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), see Ref. [1] for the full report. We calculate the probability of detecting a parton showing up at a large angle with respect to its initial direction due to scattering with the constituents of QGP, using leading order perturbative QCD. We include all relevant channels, including the Rutherford-like channel as considered in early works, and those that are not Rutherford-like but become important at a large angle. The resulting probability distributions contain information about the short distance structure of QGP. Our results provide key theoretical input toward finding the scatterers within the QGP liquid, which in turn is the necessary first step toward using precise, high-statistics, suitably differential measurements of jet modification in heavy ion collisions to study the evolution of the properties of QGP with changing resolution scale.