Energy loss in a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma

Abstract

We study the energy loss of a rotating infinitely massive quark moving, at constant velocity, through an anisotropic strongly-coupled N=4 plasma from holography. It is shown that, similar to the isotropic plasma, the energy loss of the rotating quark is due to either the drag force or radiation with a continuous crossover from drag-dominated regime to the radiation dominated regime. We find that the anisotropy has a significant effect on the energy loss of the heavy quark, specially in the crossover regime. We argue that the energy loss due to radiation in anisotropic media is less than the isotropic case. Interestingly this is similar to analogous calculations for the energy loss in weakly coupled anisotropic plasma.Comment: 26+1 pages, 10 figures, typos fixe

Thermodynamics of anisotropic branes

“…The rotational SO(3) symmetry in the space directions is broken by the new term down to SO (2) in the xy-plane. Various observables have been computed for this plasma, see for example [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] for a non-exhaustive list. 1 However, one of the important phenomena that has so far eluded scrutiny are precisely the phase transitions of fundamental matter mentioned above.…”

Anisotropic plasma at finite U(1) chemical potential

“…Inspired by this seminal work, many studies have been focused on the effects of the anisotropy on more physical observables of the anisotropic plasma, such as the drag force experienced by an infinitely massive quark propagating at constant velocity in this anisotropic background [37], the jet quenching parameter of this anisotropic plasma [38][39][40] and the anisotropy effect on heavy-quark energy loss [41]. Remarkably, the shear viscosity longitudinal to the direction of anisotropy is found violating the holographic viscosity bound [42] which presented the first example of such violation non-involving higher-derivative theories of gravity.…”

Chiral drag force

“…'radial') coordinate in ref. [51] and heavy quark energy loss and diffusion has by now been investigated in the equilibrium plasmas of many gauge theories with gravitational duals [52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66]. In particular, the drag force on a heavy quark in a static plasma with µ = 0 was calculated in refs.…”