Lattice study of a magnetic contribution to heavy quark momentum diffusion

bstract Heavy quarks placed within a hot QCD medium undergo Brownian motion, characterized by specific transport coefficients. Their determination can be simplified by expanding them in T/M , where T is the temperature and M is a heavy quark mass. The leading term in the expansion originates from the colour-electric part of a Lorentz force, whereas the next-to-leading order involves the colour-magnetic part. We measure a colour-magnetic 2-point correlator in quenched QCD at T ∼ (1 . 2 − 2 . 0) T c . Employing multilevel techniques and non-perturbative renormalization, a good signal is obtained, and its continuum extrapolation can be estimated. Modelling the shape of the corresponding spectral function, we subsequently extract the momentum diffusion coefficient, κ . For charm (bottom) quarks, the magnetic contribution adds ∼ 30% (10%) to the electric one. The same increases apply also to the drag coefficient, η . As an aside, the colour-magnetic spectral function is computed at NLO.