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In the framework of Soft-Collinear Effective Theory, the jet quenching parameter, $\hat{q}$, has been evaluated by adding the effect of Glauber gluon interactions to the propagation of a highly-energetic collinear parton in a medium. The result, which holds in covariant gauges, has been expressed in terms of the expectation value of two Wilson lines stretching along the direction of the four-momentum of the parton. In this paper, we show how that expression can be generalized to an arbitrary gauge by the addition of transverse Wilson lines. The transverse Wilson lines are explicitly computed by resumming interactions of the parton with Glauber gluons that appear only in non-covariant gauges. As an application of our result, we discuss the contribution to $\hat{q}$ coming from transverse momenta of order $g^2T$ in a medium that is a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma., Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures; journal version

A deterministic coalescing dynamics with constant rate for a particle system in a finite volume with a fixed initial number of particles is considered. It is shown that, in the thermodynamic limit, with the constraint of fixed density, the corresponding coagulation equation is recovered and global in time propagation of chaos holds., Comment: 27 pages

The thermal width of heavy-quarkonium bound states in a quark-gluon plasma has been recently derived in an effective field theory approach. Two phenomena contribute to the width: the Landau damping phenomenon and the break-up of a colour-singlet bound state into a colour-octet heavy quark-antiquark pair by absorption of a thermal gluon. In the paper, we investigate the relation between the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up and the so-called gluo-dissociation, a mechanism for quarkonium dissociation widely used in phenomenological approaches. The gluo-dissociation thermal width is obtained by convoluting the gluon thermal distribution with the cross section of a gluon and a 1S quarkonium state to a colour octet quark-antiquark state in vacuum, a cross section that at leading order, but neglecting colour-octet effects, was computed long ago by Bhanot and Peskin. We will, first, show that the effective field theory framework provides a natural derivation of the gluo-dissociation factorization formula at leading order, which is, indeed, the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up expression. Second, the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up expression will allow us to improve the Bhanot--Peskin cross section by including the contribution of the octet potential, which amounts to include final-state interactions between the heavy quark and antiquark. Finally, we will quantify the effects due to final-state interactions on the gluo-dissociation cross section and on the quarkonium thermal width., Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures

Heavy quarkonium at finite temperature has been the subject of intense theoretical studies, for it provides a potentially clean probe of the quark-gluon plasma. Recent studies have made use of effective field theories to exploit in a systematic manner the hierarchy of energy scales that characterize the system. In the case of a quarkonium in a medium whose temperature is smaller than the typical momentum transfer in the bound state but larger than its energy, the suitable effective field theory is pNRQCD_HTL, where degrees of freedom with energy or momentum larger than the binding energy have been integrated out. Thermal effects are expected to break Poincar\'e invariance, which, at zero temperature, manifests itself in a set of exact relations between the matching coefficients of the effective field theory. In the paper, we evaluate the leading-order thermal corrections to the spin-orbit potentials of pNRQCD_HTL and show that Poincar\'e invariance is indeed violated., Comment: 17 page, 4 figures. Version published on JHEP

We study the propagation of non-relativistic bound states moving at constant velocity across a homogeneous thermal bath and we develop the effective field theory which is relevant in various dynamical regimes. We consider values of the velocity of the bound state ranging from moderate to highly relativistic and temperatures at all relevant scales smaller than the mass of the particles that form the bound state. In particular, we consider two distinct temperature regimes, corresponding to temperatures smaller or higher than the typical momentum transfer in the bound state. For temperatures smaller or of the order of the typical momentum transfer, we restrict our analysis to the simplest system, a hydrogen-like atom. We build the effective theory for this system first considering moderate values of the velocity and then the relativistic case. For large values of the velocity of the bound state, the separation of scales is such that the corresponding effective theory resembles the soft collinear effective theory (SCET). For temperatures larger than the typical momentum transfer we also consider muonic hydrogen propagating in a plasma which contains photons and massless electrons and positrons, so that the system resembles very much heavy quarkonium in a thermal medium of deconfined quarks and gluons. We study the behavior of the real and imaginary part of the static two-body potential, for various velocities of the bound state, in the hard thermal loop approximation. We find that Landau damping ceases to be the relevant mechanism for dissociation from a certain "critical" velocity on in favor of screening. Our results are relevant for understanding how the properties of heavy quarkonia states produced in the initial fusion of partons in the relativistic collision of heavy ions are affected by the presence of an equilibrated quark-gluon plasma., Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures. Minor corrections, reference added. Closely matches version to be published in Physical Review D

The temporal evolution of a perturbation of the equilibrium distribution of a condensed Bose gas is investigated using the kinetic equation which describes collision between condensate and noncondensate atoms. The dynamics is studied in the low momentum limit where an analytical treatment is feasible. Explicit results are given for the behavior at large times in different temperature regimes., Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures. Typos corrected. Final version to appear in Annals of Physics

We illustrate how to apply modern effective field theory techniques and dimensional regularization to factorise the various scales which appear in QED bound states at finite temperature. We focus here on the muonic hydrogen atom. Vacuum polarization effects make the physics of this atom at finite temperature very close to that of heavy quarkonium states. We comment on the implications of our results for these states in the quark gluon plasma. In particular, we estimate the effects of a finite charm quark mass in the dissociation temperature of bottomonium., Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures. Journal version, reference added

We calculate the heavy quarkonium energy levels and decay widths in a quark-gluon plasma, whose temperature T and screening mass m_D satisfy the hierarchy m alpha_s >> T >> m alpha_s^2 >> m_D (m being the heavy-quark mass), at order m alpha_s^5. We first sequentially integrate out the scales m, m alpha_s and T, and, next, we carry out the calculations in the resulting effective theory using techniques of integration by regions. A collinear region is identified, which contributes at this order. We also discuss the implications of our results concerning heavy quarkonium suppression in heavy ion collisions., Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures

We study the recently proposed effective field theory for the phonon of an arbitrary non-relativistic superfluid. After computing the one-loop phonon self-energy, we obtain the low temperature T contributions to the phonon dispersion law at low momentum, and see that the real part of those can be parametrized as a thermal correction to the phonon velocity. Because the phonons are the quanta of the sound waves, at low momentum their velocity should agree with the speed of sound. We find that our results match at order T^4ln(T) with those predicted by Andreev and Khalatnikov for the speed of sound, derived from the superfluid hydrodynamical equations and the phonon kinetic theory. We get also higher order corrections of order T^4, which are not reproduced pushing naively the kinetic theory computation. Finally, as an application, we consider the cold Fermi gas in the unitarity limit, and find a universal expression for the low T relative correction to the speed of sound for these systems., Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. References added

We consider ballistic aggregation equation for gases in which each particle is iden- ti?ed either by its mass and impulsion or by its sole impulsion. For the constant aggregation rate we prove existence of self-similar solutions as well as convergence to the self-similarity for generic solutions. For some classes of mass and/or impulsion dependent rates we are also able to estimate the large time decay of some moments of generic solutions or to build some new classes of self-similar solutions.

This letter is devoted to results on intermediate asymptotics for the heat equation. We study the convergence towards a stationary solution in self-similar variables. By assuming the equality of some moments of the initial data and of the stationary solution, we get improved convergence rates using entropy / entropy-production methods. We establish the equivalence of the exponential decay of the entropies with new, improved functional inequalities in restricted classes of functions. This letter is the counterpart in a linear framework of a recent work on fast diffusion equations, see [Bonforte-Dolbeault-Grillo-Vazquez]. Results extend to the case of a Fokker-Planck equation with a general confining potential.

We compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity for a non-relativistic superfluid corresponding to a fermionic system close to the unitarity limit. We consider the low temperature regime assuming that the transport properties of the system are dominated by phonons. To compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity we use kinetic theory in the relaxation time approximation and the low energy effective field theory of the corresponding system. We show that the three independent bulk viscosity coefficients, $\zeta_1, \zeta_2, \zeta_3$, associated with irreversible flows vanish for phonons with a linear dispersion law. Considering a phonon dispersion law with a cubic term in momentum we find that in the conformal limit $\zeta_1 = \zeta_2=0$, while $\zeta_3$ is non-zero. Including a conformal breaking term which arises for a large but finite s-wave scattering length, $a$, at the leading order in $1/a$ we obtain that $\zeta_1 \propto 1/a$ and $\zeta_2 \propto 1/a^2$., Comment: 14 pages, minor corrections, references added, closely matches published version

We study the four-wave kinetic equation of weak turbulence linearized around the Rayleigh-Jeans spectrum when the collision integral is associated with short-range interactions between non-relativistic bosonic quasiparticles. The technique used for the analysis of the stability is based on the properties of the Mellin transform of the kernel in the integral equation. We find that any perturbation of the Rayleigh-Jeans distribution evolves towards low momentum scales in such a form that, when $t \to \infty$, all the particles occupy a sphere of radius arbitrary small., Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E; new figure, references and discussion added. 17 pages, 3 figures

The Keller-Segel system describes the collective motion of cells that are attracted by a chemical substance and are able to emit it. In its simplest form, it is a conservative drift-diffusion equation for the cell density coupled to an elliptic equation for the chemo-attractant concentration. This paper deals with the rate of convergence towards a unique stationary state in self-similar variables, which describes the intermediate asymptotics of the solutions in the original variables. Although it is known that solutions globally exist for any mass less $8\pi $, a smaller mass condition is needed in our approach for proving an exponential rate of convergence in self-similar variables.

We illustrate how to apply modern effective field theory techniques and dimensional regularization to factorize the various scales which appear in non-relativistic bound states at finite temperature. We focus here on the simplest case: the hydrogen atom. We discuss in detail the interplay of the hard, soft and ultrasoft scales of the non-relativistic system at zero temperature with the additional scales induced at finite temperature. We also comment on the implications of our results for heavy quarkonium bound states in the quark gluon plasma., Comment: 28 pages, 1 table. Numerical factors in formulas (23), (25), (26) and (28), as well as a few misprints elswhere corrected. Supersedes journal version