Probing strongly coupled anisotropic plasma

TL;DR

This paper investigates how anisotropy in a strongly coupled plasma affects key properties like the static potential, drag force, and jet quenching, revealing directional dependencies and enhancements compared to isotropic plasmas.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of anisotropic effects on plasma properties in strongly coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills theory, highlighting directional variations and quantitative changes.

Findings

Jet quenching is generally enhanced by anisotropy.

Drag force is always stronger along the anisotropic direction.

Static potential decreases more along the anisotropic direction.

Abstract

We calculate the static potential, the drag force and the jet quenching parameter in strongly coupled anisotropic N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma. We find that the jet quenching is in general enhanced in presence of anisotropy compared to the isotropic case and that its value depends strongly on the direction of the moving quark and the direction along which the momentum broadening occurs. The jet quenching is strongly enhanced for a quark moving along the anisotropic direction and momentum broadening happens along the transverse one. The parameter gets lower for a quark moving along the transverse direction and the momentum broadening considered along the anisotropic one. Finally, a weaker enhancement is observed when the quark moves in the transverse plane and the broadening occurs on the same plane. The drag force for quark motion parallel to the anisotropy is always enhanced. For motion in the transverse space the drag force is enhanced compared to the isotropic case only for quarks having velocity above a critical value. Below this critical value the force is decreased. Moreover, the drag force along the anisotropic direction is always stronger than the force in the transverse space. The diffusion time follows exactly the inverse relations of the drag forces. The static potential is decreased and stronger decrease observed for quark-antiquark pair aligned along the anisotropic direction than the transverse one. We finally comment on our results and elaborate on their similarities and differences with the weakly coupled plasmas.