  In an absorptive plasma, damping of radiation mechanisms can influence the
bremsstrahlung formation in case of large radiation formation lengths. We study
qualitatively the influence of this effect on the gluon bremsstrahlung spectrum
off heavy quarks in the quark-gluon plasma. Independent of the heavy-quark
mass, the spectrum is found to be strongly suppressed in an intermediate gluon
energy region which grows with increasing gluon damping rate and increasing
energy of the heavy quark. Thus, just as polarization effects in the plasma
render the bremsstrahlung spectra independent of the quark mass in the soft
gluon regime, damping effects tend to have a similar impact for larger gluon
energies.
