Mass-suppressed effects in heavy quark diffusion

Understand

Many lattice studies of heavy quark diffusion originate from a colour-electric correlator, obtained as a leading term after an expansion in the inverse of the heavy-quark mass.

• In view of the fact that the charm quark is not particularly heavy, we consider subleading terms in the expansion.
• Working out correlators up to $O(1/M^2)$, we argue that the leading corrections are suppressed by $O(T/M)$, and one of them can be extracted from a colour-magnetic correlator.
• The corresponding transport coefficient is non-perturbative already at leading order in the weak-coupling expansion, and therefore requires a non-perturbative determination.