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Updated: Jul 4, 2026

The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow
Published on: May 1, 2018
Nonperturbative heavy-quark diffusion in the quark-gluon plasma
H van Hees1, M Mannarelli, V Greco
1Cyclotron Institute and Physics Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3366, USA.
Abstract:
We evaluate heavy-quark (HQ) transport properties in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) within a Brueckner many-body scheme employing interaction potentials extracted from thermal lattice QCD. The in-medium T matrices for elastic charm- and bottom-quark scattering off light quarks in the QGP are dominated by attractive meson and diquark channels which support resonance states up to temperatures of ~1.5T(c). The resulting drag coefficient increases with decreasing temperature, contrary to expectations based on perturbative QCD scattering. Employing relativistic Langevin simulations we compute HQ spectra and elliptic flow in sqrt[s(NN)]=200 GeV Au-Au collisions. A good agreement with electron decay data supports our nonperturbative computation of HQ diffusion, indicative for a strongly coupled QGP.
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