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arXiv · 1102.4893

Early-Time Energy Loss in a Strongly-Coupled SYM Plasma

Alberto Guijosa·Juan F. Pedraza
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Abstract

We carry out an analytic study of the early-time motion of a quark in a strongly-coupled maximally-supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma, using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Our approach extracts the first thermal effects as a small perturbation of the known quark dynamics in vacuum, using a double expansion that is valid for early times and for (moderately) ultrarelativistic quark velocities. The quark is found to lose energy at a rate that differs significantly from the previously derived stationary/late-time result: it scales like T^4 instead of T^2, and is associated with a friction coefficient that is not independent of the quark momentum. Under conditions representative of the quark-gluon plasma as obtained at RHIC, the early energy loss rate is a few times smaller than its late-time counterpart. Our analysis additionally leads to thermally-corrected expressions for the intrinsic energy and momentum of the quark, in which the previously discovered limiting velocity of the quark is found to appear naturally.

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Alberto Guijosa, Juan F. Pedraza. 2011-05-20. Early-Time Energy Loss in a Strongly-Coupled SYM Plasma. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep05(2011)108

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