Are Gluon Showers inside a Quark-Gluon Plasma Strongly Coupled? A Theorist’s Test

Abstract

We study whether in-medium showers of high-energy gluons can be treated as a sequence of individual splitting processes g→gg, or whether there is significant quantum overlap between where one splitting ends and the next begins. Accounting for the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect, we calculate such overlap effects to leading order in high-energy α_{s}(μ) for the simplest theoretical situation. We investigate a measure of overlap effects that is independent of physics that can be absorbed into an effective value q[over ^]_{eff} of the jet-quenching parameter q[over ^].

Topics & Concepts