Jet quenching parameter $\hat{q}$ in the stochastic QCD vacuum with Landau damping

We argue that the radiative energy loss of a parton traversing the quark–gluon plasma is determined by Landau damping of soft modes in the plasma. Using this idea, we calculate the jet quenching parameter of a gluon. The calculation is done in SU(3) quenched QCD within the stochastic vacuum model. At the LHC-relevant temperatures, the result depends on the gluon condensate, the vacuum correlation length, and the gluon Debye mass. Numerically, when the temperature varies from T=T_c to T = 900 MeV, the jet quenching parameter rises from to approximately 1.8 GeV²/fm. We compare our results with the predictions of perturbative QCD and other calculations.