Shining a Gluon Beam Through Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We compute the energy density radiated by a quark undergoing circular motion in strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma. If it were in vacuum, this quark would radiate a beam of strongly coupled radiation whose angular distribution has been characterized and is very similar to that of synchrotron radiation produced by an electron in circular motion in electrodynamics. Here, we watch this beam of gluons getting quenched by the strongly coupled plasma. We find that a beam of gluons of momenta $\sim q\gg \pi T$ is attenuated rapidly, over a distance $\sim q^{1/3}(\pi T{)}^{-4/3}$ in a plasma with temperature $T$. As the beam propagates through the plasma at the speed of light, it sheds trailing sound waves with momenta $\lesssim \pi T$. Presumably these sound waves would thermalize in the plasma if they were not hit soon after their production by the next pulse of gluons from the lighthouse-like rotating quark. At larger and larger $q$, the trailing sound wave becomes less and less prominent. The outward going beam of gluon radiation itself shows no tendency to spread in angle or to shift toward larger wavelengths, even as it is completely attenuated. In this regard, the behavior of the beam of gluons that we analyze is reminiscent of the behavior of jets produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC that lose a significant fraction of their energy without appreciable change in their angular distribution or their momentum distribution as they plow through the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma produced in these collisions.

16 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Jet momentum dependence of jet quenching in PbPb collisions at sqrt(sNN)=2.76 TeV
• A Hybrid Strong/Weak Coupling Approach to Jet Quenching
• Heavy ions and string theory
• Evolution of the jet opening angle distribution in holographic plasma
• Jet quenching in strongly coupled plasma
• Heavy Quark Production and Energy Loss
• Jet Wake from Linearized Hydrodynamics
• Early thermalization, hydrodynamics and energy loss in AdS/CFT
• Evolution of the Mean Jet Shape and Dijet Asymmetry Distribution of an Ensemble of Holographic Jets in Strongly Coupled Plasma
• Radiation and a dynamical UV/IR connection in AdS/CFT
• Coupling dependence of jet quenching in hot strongly-coupled gauge theories
• Tidal stretching of gravitons into classical strings: application to jet quenching with AdS/CFT
• Drag force to all orders in gradients
• No Line on the Horizon: On Uniform Acceleration and Gluonic Fields at Strong Coupling
• Spiraling String in Gauss-Bonnet Geometry
• Holographic energy loss in non-relativistic backgrounds
• On the Evolution of Jet Energy and Opening Angle in Strongly Coupled Plasma