Jet quenching in hot strongly coupled gauge theories revisited: 3-point correlators with gauge-gravity duality

TL;DR

This paper revisits jet quenching in strongly coupled gauge theories, establishing a clear initial state in { m N}=4 super Yang Mills theory and using gauge-gravity duality to analyze real-time 3-point correlators at finite temperature.

Contribution

It provides a well-defined gauge theory setup for jet stopping and computes 3-point correlators using gauge-gravity duality, revealing a smaller stopping scale than previously thought.

Findings

Jet does not survive beyond the E^{1/3} scale.

Most jets stop at a scale proportional to (E L)^{1/4}.

Clarifies the gauge-theory initial state for jet quenching studies.

Abstract

Previous studies of high-energy jet stopping in strongly-coupled plasmas have lacked a clear gauge-theory specification of the initial state. We show how to set up a well-defined gauge theory problem to study jet stopping in pure {\cal N}=4 super Yang Mills theory (somewhat analogous to Hofman and Maldacena's studies at zero temperature) and solve it by using gauge-gravity duality for real-time, finite-temperature 3-point correlators. Previous studies have found that the stopping distance scales with energy as E^{1/3} (with disagreement on the gauge coupling dependence). We do find that none of the jet survives beyond this scale, but we find that almost all of our jet stops at a parametrically smaller scale proportional to (E L)^{1/4}, where L is the size of the space-time region where the jet is initially created.