The Wake of a Quark Moving through Hot QCD Plasmas vs. N = 4 SYM Plasmas

Abstract

We present the energy density and flux distribution of a heavy quark moving through high temperature QCD plasmas and compare them with those in the strongly coupled N = 4 SYM plasma. The Boltzmann equation is reformulated as a Fokker-Planck equation at the leading log approximation and is solved numerically with nontrivial boundary conditions in momentum space. We use kinetic theory and perform a Fourier transform to calculate the energy and momentum density in position space. The angular distributions exhibit the transition to the ideal hydrodynamics and are analyzed with the first and second order hydrodynamic source. The AdS/CFT correspondence allows the same calculation at strong coupling. Compared to the kinetic theory results, the energy-momentum tensor is better described by hydrodynamics even after accounting for the differences in the shear viscosities. We argue that the difference between the Boltzmann equation and the AdS/CFT correspondence comes from the second order hydrodynamic coefficient ${\tau }_{\pi }$ which is generically large compared to the shear length in a theory based on the Boltzmann equation.

8 pages, 6 figures, prepared for proceedings of DPF 2011 Conference, Providence, RI, August 8-13, 2011

References in corpus (4)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• The stress-energy tensor of a quark moving through a strongly-coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma: comparing hydrodynamics and AdS/CFT
• Sonic booms and diffusion wakes generated by a heavy quark in thermal AdS/CFT
• Spectral densities for hot QCD plasmas in a leading log approximation