We compute the transport coefficient $\widehat{q}$ which quantifies the transverse momentum broadening of hard probes passing through the evolving glasma from the earliest stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We use a proper-time expansion method which is designed to study the glasma at very early times. In our earlier calculations of $\widehat{q}$ we used an approximation that greatly simplifies the complexity of the calculation but introduces a violation of gauge invariance. Based on these results we argued that the glasma plays an important role in jet quenching. In this paper we have used a gauge invariant formulation to calculate $\widehat{q}$. The results for the momentum broadening coefficient are quantitatively very close to those of our previous simplified version of the calculation and confirm our earlier conclusion about the importance of the glasma contribution to jet quenching.

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• Jet quenching
• Quark-gluon plasma
• Relativistic heavy-ion collisions