Strongly-Coupled Quarks and Colorful Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper employs the AdS/CFT correspondence to analyze the behavior of strongly-coupled quarks in the vicinity of a black hole, revealing how black hole geometry influences quark dynamics and interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel supergravity background model to study strongly-coupled quarks near black holes, extending the analysis closer to singularities than previous models.

Findings

Quarks near black holes lose energy at a calculable rate.

Black holes can carry color charges inherited from partons.

The black hole modifies the screening length between quark-antiquark pairs.

Abstract

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study the behavior of strongly-coupled quarks in a black hole background. The supergravity background consists of a six-dimensional Schwarzschild-black string AdS soliton, for which the bulk horizon extends from the AdS boundary down to an infra-red floor. By going to higher energy scales, the regime of validity of the classical supergravity background can be extended closer to the singularity than might be expected from the four-dimensional perspective. Small black holes potentially created by the Large Hadron Collider could typically carry color charges inherited from their parton progenitors. The dynamics of quarks near such a black hole depends on the curved spacetime geometry as well as the strong interaction with the color-charged black hole. We study the resulting behavior of quarks and compute the rate at which a quark rotating around the black hole loses energy. We also investigate how the interaction between a quark and an antiquark is altered by the presence of the black hole, which results in a screening length.