Jet Quenching in Non-Conformal Holography

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-conformal holographic models of QCD influence the energy loss of quarks in a strongly coupled plasma, revealing a temperature-dependent scaling of quark stopping distances.

Contribution

It introduces a non-conformal holographic QCD model to analyze quark energy loss, extending previous conformal approaches and highlighting the impact of the QCD trace anomaly.

Findings

The nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for bottom and charm quarks was computed.

The maximum stopping distance of light quarks scales with energy and temperature.

A temperature-dependent effective power governs quark stopping distances.

Abstract

We use our non-conformal holographic bottom-up model for QCD described in 1012.0116 to further study the effect of the QCD trace anomaly on the energy loss of both light and heavy quarks in a strongly coupled plasma. We compute the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for bottom and charm quarks in an expanding plasma with Glauber initial conditions. We find that the maximum stopping distance of light quarks in a non-conformal plasma scales with the energy with a temperature (and energy) dependent effective power.