Jet-medium interactions at NLO in a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma

Abstract: We present an extension to next-to-leading order in the strong coupling constant g of the AMY effective kinetic approach to the energy loss of high momentum particles in the quark-gluon plasma. At leading order, the transport of jet-like particles is determined by elastic scattering with the thermal constituents, and by inelastic collinear splittings induced by the medium. We reorganize this description into collinear splittings, high-momentum-transfer scatterings, drag and diffusion, and particle conversions (momentum-preserving identity-changing processes). We show that this reorganized description remains valid to NLO in g, and compute the appropriate modifications of the drag, diffusion, particle conversion, and inelastic splitting coefficients. In addition, a new kinematic regime opens at NLO for wider-angle collinear bremsstrahlung. These semi-collinear emissions smoothly interpolate between the leading order high-momentum-transfer scatterings and collinear splittings. To organize the calculation, we introduce a set of Wilson line operators on the light-cone which determine the diffusion and identity changing coefficients, and we show how to evaluate these operators at NLO.