Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Similar to the radiative parton energy loss due to gluon bremsstrahlung, elastic energy loss of a parton undergoing multiple scattering in a finite medium is demonstrated to be sensitive to interference effect. The interference between amplitudes of elastic scattering via a gluon exchange and that of gluon radiation reduces the effective elastic energy loss in a finite medium and gives rise to a non-trivial length dependence. The reduction is most significant for a propagation length L< 4/\pi T in a medium with a temperature T. Though the finite size effect is not significant for the average parton propagation in the most central heavy-ion collisions, it will affect the centrality dependence of its effect on jet quenching.