Energy loss in a partonic transport model including bremsstrahlung processes

A detailed investigation of the energy loss of gluons that traverse a thermal gluonic medium simulated within the perturbative QCD-based transport model BAMPS (a Boltzmann approach to multiparton scatterings) is presented in the first part of this work. For simplicity the medium response is neglected in these calculations. The energy loss from purely elastic interactions is compared with the case where radiative processes are consistently included based on the matrix element by Gunion and Bertsch. From this comparison, gluon multiplication processes gg→ggg are found to be the dominant source of energy loss within the approach employed here. The consequences for the quenching of gluons with high transverse momentum in fully dynamic simulations of Au+Au collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) energy of √(s)=200A GeV are discussed in the second major part of this work. The results for central collisions as discussed in a previous publication are revisited, and first results on the nuclear modification factor RAA for noncentral Au+Au collisions are presented. They show a decreased quenching compared to central collisions while retaining the same shape. The investigation of the elliptic flow v2 is extended up to nonthermal transverse momenta of 10 GeV, exhibiting a maximum v2 at roughly 4 to 5 GeV and a subsequent decrease. Finally the sensitivity of the aforementioned results on the specific implementation of the effective modeling of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect via a formation-time-based cutoff is explored.