Quark Propagation in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions behaves as a nearly ideal fluid. That behavior may be understood if the quark and antiquark mean-free- paths are very small in the system, leading to a "sticky molasses" description of the plasma, as advocated by the Stony Brook group. This behavior may be traced to the fact that there are relatively low-energy $q\bar{q}$ resonance states in the plasma leading to very large scattering lengths for the quarks. These resonances have been found in lattice simulation of QCD using the maximum entropy method (MEM). We have used a chiral quark model, which provides a simple representation of effects due to instanton dynamics, to study the resonances obtained using the MEM scheme. In the present work we use our model to study the optical potential of a quark in the quark-gluon plasma and calculate the quark mean-free-path. Our results represent a specific example of the dynamics of the plasma as described by the Stony Brook group.