Soft-gluon exchange matters: isotropic screening in QCD kinetic theory

Understand

QCD kinetic theory simulations are a prominent tool for studying the nonequilibrium initial stages in heavy-ion collisions.

• Despite their success, all implementations rely on approximations of the hard thermal loop (HTL) screened matrix elements in the collision terms.
• In this paper, we present our results for different isotropic screening prescriptions in the elastic collision term for gluons.
• In particular, we go beyond the simple Debye-like screening form that is used in all current implementations and apply the isotropic HTL matrix element instead.