Energy loss of a heavy fermion in an anisotropic QED plasma

Abstract

We compute the leading-order collisional energy loss of a heavy fermion propagating in a QED plasma with an electron distribution function which is anisotropic in momentum space. We show that in the presence of such anisotropies there can be a significant directional dependence of the heavy fermion energy loss with the effect being large for highly relativistic velocities. We also repeat the analysis of the isotropic case more carefully and show that the final result depends on the intermediate scale used to separate hard and soft contributions to the energy loss. We then show that the canonical isotropic result is obtained in the weak-coupling limit. For intermediate coupling we use the residual scale dependence as a measure of our theoretical uncertainty. We also discuss complications which could arise due to the presence of unstable soft photonic modes and demonstrate that the calculation of the energy loss is safe.