Speaker
Description
High energy particles passing through medium primarily lose energy by showering through bremsstrahlung and pair production. At high energies, the quantum mechanical duration of the splitting process, called the formation time exceeds the mean free time between collisions with the medium and leads to a significant suppression of the splitting rate. This suppression is known as the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. A long standing problem in field theory had been to calculate this effect for situations where the formation times of two consecutive splittings overlap. We (Peter Arnold, myself and Han Chih-Chang) developed and implemented field theory formalism to calculate such overlap corrections to real double splittings and overlapping virtual processes in large-Nc QCD and large-Nf QED. Here Nc is the number of colors and Nf is the number of electron flavors. In this talk, I will explain our formalism for calculating these corrections going beyond soft emissions as well as giving a preview of our results for overlap corrections to in-medium electron energy loss and stopping distances.
