Screening length and the direction of plasma winds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the screening length of a heavy quark-antiquark pair varies with the direction of plasma winds in strongly coupled gauge theories, revealing directional dependencies and comparing weak and strong coupling results.

Contribution

It extends the analysis of screening length dependence on wind direction in plasma to many theories and includes subleading velocity effects for Dp-branes.

Findings

Screening length is minimized when the pair is perpendicular to plasma winds.

Screening length is maximized when the pair is parallel to plasma winds.

Comparison of AdS/CFT results with weak coupling theories shows qualitative agreement.

Abstract

We study the screening length of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in strongly coupled gauge theory plasmas flowing at velocity v following a proposal by Liu, Rajagopal, and Wiedemann. We analyze the screening length as the direction of the plasma winds vary. To leading order in v, this angle-dependence can be studied analytically for many theories by extending our previous formalism. We show that the screening length is locally a minimum (maximum) when the pair is perpendicular (parallel) to the plasma winds, which has been observed for the N=4 plasma. Also, we compare AdS/CFT results with weak coupling ones, and we discuss the subleading dependence on v for the Dp-brane.