Deep inelastic scattering off a N=4 SYM plasma at strong coupling

Abstract

By using the AdS/CFT correspondence we study the deep inelastic scattering of an R-current off a N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) plasma at finite temperature and strong coupling. Within the supergravity approximation valid when the number of colors is large, we compute the structure functions by solving Maxwell equations in the space-time geometry of the AdS_5 black three-brane. We find a rather sharp transition between a low energy regime where the scattering is weak and quasi-elastic, and a high-energy regime where the current is completely absorbed. The critical energy for this transition determines the plasma saturation momentum in terms of its temperature T and the Bjorken x variable: Q_s=T/x. These results suggest a partonic picture for the plasma where all the partons have transverse momenta below the saturation momentum and occupation numbers of order one.

Version accepted for publication in JHEP: more references added; some technical points were displaced from Sect. 4 to the new Appendix D

References in corpus (2)

• Minkowski-space correlators in AdS/CFT correspondence: recipe and applications
• Schwinger-Keldysh Propagators from AdS/CFT Correspondence

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The stress-energy tensor of a quark moving through a strongly-coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma: comparing hydrodynamics and AdS/CFT
• Comparing energy loss and $p_{\perp }$-broadening in perturbative QCD with strong coupling $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM theory
• Deep inelastic scattering from gauge string duality in the soft wall model
• Four point function of R-currents in N=4 SYM in the Regge limit at weak coupling