Jet quenching in the early nonequilibrium QCD plasma in heavy-ion collisions

by Florian Lindenbauer (TU Wien)

Tuesday 13 Jan 2026, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions create a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons, which is initially far from equilibrium. While most studies describe this plasma as a relativistic fluid, this approximation is not valid at early times, where QCD kinetic theory can be used to model the nonequilibrium plasma dynamics. In this talk, I will discuss how this nonequilibrium plasma influences the propagation of energetic particles, which are then measured as jets in the detectors. In particular, I will discuss how their momentum broadening is modified in the presence of a nonequilibrium and anisotropic QCD medium, and how the resulting emitted gluon spectrum differs from equilibrium. These results establish a basis for incorporating nonequilibrium dynamics into realistic descriptions of jet quenching and the evolution of hard probes.