Speaker
Description
High-energy partons traversing the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) lose energy primarily through splittings induced by interactions with the medium. These processes have been studied extensively in different approximations, often assuming a near-equilibrium medium background. However, in realistic heavy-ion collisions, the QGP starts far from equilibrium and undergoes an expansion and thermalization process. Understanding how out-of-equilibrium dynamics influence medium-induced radiation is crucial for accurate modeling of jet quenching phenomena.
We employ an effective kinetic description of QCD plasma thermalization to extract the elastic broadening kernel $C(q_\perp)$ which describes transverse momentum exchange between hard probes and the medium. Using this kernel, we compute the medium-induced splitting rates in out-of-equilibrium plasma to understand how non-equilibrium dynamics affect parton energy loss mechanisms. Our results provide insights into the role of medium anisotropies and time-dependent properties of the QGP on jet quenching phenomena observed in heavy-ion collisions. We discuss the implication of our findings for understanding early-time jet-medium interactions which are crucial for studying jet quenching in small systems such as $p$-$A$ and high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions.