  The radiative energy loss of a relativistic charge in a dense, absorptive
medium can be affected significantly by damping phenomena. The effect is more
pronounced for large energies of the charge and/or large damping of the
radiation. This can be understood in terms of a competition between the
formation time of bremsstrahlung and a damping time scale. We discuss this
competition in detail for the absorptive QED and QCD medium, focusing on the
case in which the mass of the charge is large compared to the in-medium mass of
the radiation quanta. We identify the regions in energy and parameter space, in
which either coherence or damping effects are of major importance for the
radiative energy loss spectrum. We show that damping phenomena can lead to a
stronger suppression of the spectrum than coherence effects.
