Shock Treatment: Heavy Quark Drag in a Novel AdS Geometry

Abstract

We calculate the drag force on a heavy quark hit by a shock wave, thus generalizing the strongly coupled AdS/CFT heavy quark drag calculations to both hot and cold nuclear matter. The derivation employs the trailing string configuration, similar to that used in the literature for a quark moving through a thermal medium, though in the shock metric the string profile is described by a much simpler analytic function. Our expression for the drag depends on the typical transverse momentum scale of the matter in the shock. For a thermal medium this scale becomes proportional to the temperature, making our drag coefficient and momentum limit of applicability identical to those found previously. As the shock wave can be composed of either thermalized or non-thermalized media, our derivation extends the existing drag calculations to the case of arbitrarily distributed matter.

17 pages, 4 figures. Added a clarifying figure in the Appendix and made some slight textual changes. This is an expanded version of the letter to be published in Physics Letters B

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• The dynamics of quark-gluon plasma and AdS/CFT
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• Heavy Quark Production and Energy Loss
• Heavy Ion Collisions with Transverse Dynamics from Evolving AdS Geometries
• Systematic Uncertainties in Theoretical Predictions of Jet Quenching
• Early-Time Energy Loss in a Strongly-Coupled SYM Plasma
• Shock waves in strongly coupled plasmas
• Shock waves in strongly coupled plasmas II
• Strong-coupling Jet Energy Loss from AdS/CFT
• AdS/CFT applications to relativistic heavy ion collisions: a brief review
• Shock Treatment: Heavy Quark Energy Loss in a Novel AdS/CFT Geometry
• Jet suppression in non-conformal plasma using AdS/CFT
• Jet quenching in shock waves
• Weakness or Strength in the Golden Years of RHIC and LHC?