Quarkonium transport in thermal AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy mesons behave in high-temperature non-abelian plasmas using AdS/CFT, calculating mass shifts and drag coefficients at different couplings, revealing significant differences from perturbative QCD predictions.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of meson transport properties at weak and strong coupling in N=4 SYM theory using holographic methods.

Findings

Mass shift remains finite at large N

Drag coefficient is suppressed by 1/N^2

Strong coupling reduces momentum diffusion and increases relaxation time

Abstract

We consider a heavy meson moving slowly through high temperature non-abelian plasmas. Using a simple dipole effective Lagrangian, we calculate the in-medium mass shift and the drag coefficient of the meson in $\N=4$ Super Yang Mills theory at weak and strong coupling. As anticipated, in the large $N$ limit the mass shift is finite while the drag is suppressed by $1/N^2$ . After comparing results to perturbative QCD estimates (which are also calculated), we reach the conclusion that relative to weak coupling expectations the effect of strong coupling is to reduce the momentum diffusion rate and to {\it increase} the relaxation time by up to a factor of four.