Conformal Holography of Bulk Elliptic Flow and Heavy Quark Quenching in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that conformal holography can simultaneously explain bulk elliptic flow and heavy quark jet quenching in heavy ion collisions at high energies, outperforming weakly coupled models and showing robustness to higher order corrections.

Contribution

It provides a holographic model that unifies soft and hard observables in quark-gluon plasma using leading order AdS/CFT with large t'Hooft coupling, including higher order corrections.

Findings

Holography accounts for both elliptic flow and jet quenching.

Weak coupling models fail to correlate soft and hard observables.

Higher order corrections do not significantly alter holographic predictions.

Abstract

We show that the ``perfect fluid'' elliptic flow of the bulk hadrons and the unexpectedly strong quenching of heavy quark jet fragments in Au+Au reactions at 200 AGeV can be simultaneously accounted for within leading order AdS/CFT holography with a common large t'Hooft coupling $\lambda=g^2_{YM} N_c \sim 30$. In contrast, weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma models have so far failed to describe the observed correlation between these soft and hard observables even for couplings extrapolated to $\alpha_s\sim 0.5$. We show that phenomenological applications of the classical trailing string AdS/CFT holographic solution are furthermore remarkably robust to higher order curvature corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/\lambda^{3/2})$ in type IIB supergravity theories, as well as to worldsheet fluctuation corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/\lambda^{1/2})$ that were not considered previously. We emphasize the importance of future measurements at RHIC and LHC of the correlation between {\em identified} charm and beauty quark hard ($p_T > 10-30$ GeV) jet quenching observables and low transverse momenta ($p_T\le 1$ GeV) bulk elliptic flow observables to further tests the limits of applicability of conformal holography to strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma.