Stopping distance for high energy jets in weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasmas

Understand

We derive a simple formula for the stopping distance for a high-energy quark traveling through a weakly-coupled quark gluon plasma.

• The result is given to next-to-leading-order in an expansion in inverse logarithms ln(E/T), where T is the temperature of the plasma.
• We also define a stopping distance for gluons and give a leading-log result.
• Discussion of stopping distance has a theoretical advantage over discussion of energy loss rates in that stopping distances can be generalized to the case of strong coupling, where one may not speak of individual partons.