Towards a spacetime description of hard parton evolution in the quark gluon plasma

• Main Author: Meiring, Benjamin Wallace
• Other Authors: Horowitz, William
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2016
• Subjects: Theoretical Physics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20007

Typical energy loss calcuations in AdS/CFT simulations use an initial condition of off-shell pairs of quarks placed back-to-back in the QGP, but a precise and theoretically motivated description of configuration does not exist. Quark virtuality can have noticeable effects on the rate of energy loss so a first principles calculation is needed for the early time behaviour of virtual particles soon after production. We use the Schwinger Keldysh formalism to calculate a perturbative expression for the Energy Momentum Tensor of hard partons created before the formation of the Quark Gluon Plasma. We propose this as a foundational model to use as an initial condition in jet energy loss calculations.