Heavy quark thermalization using phonon-heavy quark EFT
Abstract
The description of heavy quarks inside the QGP medium, especially at low momenta, remains challenging from first principles, due to large coupling strength and gluon occupation numbers. An alternative way to formulate a description in terms of perturbative degrees of freedom is the interaction of the heavy quarks with the collective excitations of the medium in the form of phonons. This description is derived as an effective field theory (EFT) and therefore allows for a natural occurring power counting of the allowed interactions. This EFT has already been established in our previous work, where we have derived the phonon-heavy quark interactions and calculated their thermal scattering cross section. In this work, we use these results, together with the heavy quark expansion, to calculate the heavy quark drag coefficient. Subsequently, we compare our results with the drag coefficient obtained from AdS/CFT calculations to determine the previously unknown Wilson coefficients for the quark-phonon coupling. Finally, we will use these coefficients to solve the Boltzmann equation for the heavy quark distribution, studying its thermalization in the QGP via soft phonon interactions.
Related
- Heavy-quark thermalization in the quark-gluon plasma via a fractional Langevin equation
- Entropy Production and Thermalization in Heavy-Quark Langevin Dynamics
- Momentum dependence of heavy quark diffusion in a thermal gluonic plasma on the lattice
- Charm quark production in heavy-ion collisions as a signature of pre-equilibrium
- The role of strangeness and baryon enhancement in heavy-quark hadronisation from pp to Pb−Pb collisions with ALICE
BibTeX
@misc{kirchner2026heavy,
title = {{Heavy quark thermalization using phonon-heavy quark EFT}},
author = {Andreas Kirchner and Berndt Mueller and Jyotirmoy Roy and Sebastian Waeber},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.01309},
eprint = {2611.01309},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01309},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Heavy quark thermalization using phonon-heavy quark EFT
AU - Andreas Kirchner
AU - Berndt Mueller
AU - Jyotirmoy Roy
AU - Sebastian Waeber
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.01309
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01309
AB - The description of heavy quarks inside the QGP medium, especially at low momenta, remains challenging from first principles, due to large coupling strength and gluon occupation numbers. An alternative way to formulate a description in terms of perturbative degrees of freedom is the interaction of the heavy quarks with the collective excitations of the medium in the form of phonons. This description is derived as an effective field theory (EFT) and therefore allows for a natural occurring power counting of the allowed interactions. This EFT has already been established in our previous work, where we have derived the phonon-heavy quark interactions and calculated their thermal scattering cross section. In this work, we use these results, together with the heavy quark expansion, to calculate the heavy quark drag coefficient. Subsequently, we compare our results with the drag coefficient obtained from AdS/CFT calculations to determine the previously unknown Wilson coefficients for the quark-phonon coupling. Finally, we will use these coefficients to solve the Boltzmann equation for the heavy quark distribution, studying its thermalization in the QGP via soft phonon interactions.
ER -