Jets in strongly-coupled N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of jets in strongly-coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills theory using AdS/CFT, revealing how jets evolve and stop at finite temperature versus infinite spread at zero temperature, with detailed charge density analysis.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of jet evolution in N=4 SYM at finite and zero temperature using holography, highlighting the impact of initial conditions and temperature on jet dynamics.

Findings

Jets stop after finite distance at finite temperature.

Jets travel and spread indefinitely at zero temperature.

Late-time behavior of jets depends on initial conditions.

Abstract

We study jets of massless particles in N=4 super Yang-Mills using the AdS/CFT correspondence both at zero and finite temperature. We set up an initial state corresponding to a highly energetic quark/anti-quark pair and follow its time evolution into two jets. At finite temperature the jets stop after traveling a finite distance, whereas at zero temperature they travel and spread forever. We map out the corresponding baryon number charge density and identify the generic late time behavior of the jets as well as features that depend crucially on the initial conditions.