Moli\`ere Scattering in Quark-Gluon Plasma: Finding Point-Like Scatterers in a Liquid

Understand

By finding rare (but not exponentially rare) large-angle deflections of partons within a jet produced in a heavy ion collision, or of such a jet itself, experimentalists can find the weakly coupled short-distance quark and gluon particles (scatterers) within the strongly coupled liquid quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy ion collisions.

• This is the closest one can come to probing QGP via a scattering experiment and ultimately learning how a strongly coupled liquid emerges from an asymptotically free gauge theory.
• The short-distance, particulate, structure of liquid QGP can be revealed in events in which a jet parton resolves, and scatters off, a parton from the droplet of QGP.
• The probability for picking up significant transverse momentum via a single scattering was calculated previously, but only in the limit of infinite parton energy which means zero angle scattering.