Heavy quark energy losses in the quark-gluon plasma : beyond leading order

We compute, to next-to-leading order in perturbation theory, the rate of energy loss suffered by a heavy quark moving nonrelativistically in the quark-gluon plasma. This quantity is essentially a measure of the scattering rates of this quark against plasma constituents, and of their efficiency in slowing it down. The next-to-leading order correction is sensitive to the physics of overlapping scatterings, as well as to the self-interactions of gauge fields with small momenta (of order the electric screening scale). We find the next-to-leading order correction to be remarkably large, suggesting that the perturbative series is unreliable unless the coupling constant of the theory assumes unrealistically small values