Comparing the drag force on heavy quarks in N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory and QCD

By S. Gubser. 2006

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Computations of the drag force on a heavy quark moving through a thermal state of strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory have appeared recently. I compare the strength of this effect between N=4 gauge theory and QCD, using the static force between external quarks to normalize the 't Hooft coupling. Comparing N=4 and QCD at fixed energy density then leads to a relaxation time of roughly 2 fm/c for charm quarks moving through a quark-gluon plasma at T=250 MeV. This estimate should be regarded as preliminary because of the difficulties of comparing two such different theories.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70af3942f9e5a51827aef9cf2ac7a927a34c8cb6

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Citations in the corpus

Thermal transport and drag force in improved holographic QCD (2009, background): “3.1 Holographic computation and main results 12 3.2 Holographic explanation for the rise of ζ/s near Tc and the small black-hole branch 15 3.3 The adiabatic approximation 18 3.4 Buchel’s bound 20”
Strongly correlated quantum fluids: ultracold quantum gases, quantum chromodynamic plasmas and holographic duality (2012, unknown): “Gubser has advocated a value λ ≃ 6π and concludes that D ≃ 1/(2πT ) [292].”
Improved Holographic QCD (2010, methodology): “Most of the transport properties mentioned above have been successfully computed in N = 4 SYM and a lot of debate is still waged as to how they can be applied to QCD in the appropriate temperature range, [11],[50],[51].”
Holographic spectral functions and diffusion constants for fundamental matter (2007, background): “Hence a direct comparison of either approach for the N = 2 theory to the experimental data for QCD is difficult [47, 49].”
Light quark energy loss in strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma (2008, unknown): “[12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25], and references therein.”
Gluon energy loss in the gauge-string duality (2008, methodology): “An alternative scheme for comparing N = 4 SYM to QCD was proposed in [12].”
Heavy ions and string theory (2013, background): “ nite, corrections to the formula p=m= v= p 1 v2 are negligible, so we may re-express (139) as dp dt = p ˝Q where ˝Q= 2mQ ˇT2 SYM p ; (140) where = g2 YMNis the ’t Hooft coupling. It was argued in [135] that a good comparison between N= 4 super-Yang-Mills theory and QCD can be made at xed energy ra”
Momentum fluctuations of heavy quarks in the gauge-string duality (2006, methodology): “• An “alternative” comparison scheme was proposed in [34].”