The Gluonic Field of a Heavy Quark in Conformal Field Theories at Strong Coupling

TL;DR

This paper calculates the gluonic field around a heavy quark in N=4 super-Yang-Mills at strong coupling using AdS/CFT, revealing signals propagate without temporal broadening and exploring various quark motions.

Contribution

It provides a novel computation of the gluonic field configuration for arbitrary quark motion in conformal field theories at strong coupling, using holographic duality.

Findings

Signals propagate without temporal broadening.

Results apply to any 3+1D conformal field theory with a gravity dual.

Analyzed gluonic fields for oscillatory, circular, and accelerated quark motions.

Abstract

We determine the gluonic field configuration sourced by a heavy quark undergoing arbitrary motion in N=4 super-Yang-Mills at strong coupling and large number of colors. More specifically, we compute the expectation value of the operator tr[F^2+...] in the presence of such a quark, by means of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Our results for this observable show that signals propagate without temporal broadening, just as was found for the expectation value of the energy density in recent work by Hatta et al. We attempt to shed some additional light on the origin of this feature, and propose a different interpretation for its physical significance. As an application of our general results, we examine <tr[F^2+...]> when the quark undergoes oscillatory motion, uniform circular motion, and uniform acceleration. Via the AdS/CFT correspondence, all of our results are pertinent to any conformal field theory in 3+1 dimensions with a dual gravity formulation.