Nonperturbative Heavy-Quark Diffusion in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

We evaluate heavy-quark (HQ) transport properties in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) within a Brueckner many-body scheme employing interaction potentials extracted from thermal lattice QCD. The in-medium T matrices for elastic charm- and bottom-quark scattering off light quarks in the QGP are dominated by attractive meson and diquark channels which support resonance states up to temperatures of ∼1.5T_c. The resulting drag coefficient increases with decreasing temperature, contrary to expectations based on perturbative QCD scattering. Employing relativistic Langevin simulations we compute HQ spectra and elliptic flow in √s_NN=200  GeV Au-Au collisions. A good agreement with electron decay data supports our nonperturbative computation of HQ diffusion, indicative for a strongly coupled QGP.