Energy loss and thermalization of heavy quarks in a strongly-coupled plasma

TL;DR

This paper uses the AdS/CFT correspondence to analyze how heavy quarks lose energy and thermalize in a strongly-coupled plasma, providing perturbative corrections for small deceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative approach to compute energy loss corrections for decelerating heavy quarks in a strongly-coupled plasma using AdS/CFT.

Findings

First two corrections to energy-loss rate for small deceleration

Analysis of heavy quark thermalization in strongly-coupled plasma

Perturbative method applicable to decelerating quarks

Abstract

Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we compute the medium-induced energy loss of a decelerating heavy quark moving through a strongly-coupled supersymmetric Yang Mills plasma. In the regime where the deceleration is small, a perturbative calculation is possible and we obtain the first two corrections to the energy-loss rate of a heavy quark with constant velocity. The thermalization of the heavy quark is also discussed.