Probing Two Holographic Models of Strongly Coupled Anisotropic Plasma

TL;DR

This paper compares two holographic models of strongly coupled anisotropic quark-gluon plasma, analyzing their predictions for heavy-quark potential and jet quenching, and contrasting them with weakly coupled plasma results.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of two distinct holographic models of anisotropic plasma and their implications for observable phenomena like quark potential and jet quenching.

Findings

Different models yield distinct predictions for quark potential.

Jet quenching behavior varies between models.

Comparison highlights differences with weakly coupled plasma results.

Abstract

Quark-gluon plasma during its initial phase after its production in heavy-ion collisions is expected to have substantial pressure anisotropies. In order to model this situation by a strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma with fixed anisotropy by means of AdS/CFT duality, two models have been discussed in the literature. Janik and Witaszczyk have considered a geometry involving a comparatively benign naked singularity, while more recently Mateos and Trancanelli have used a regular geometry involving a nontrivial axion field dual to a parity-odd deformation of the gauge theory by a spatially varying theta parameter. We study the (rather different) implications of these two models on the heavy-quark potential as well as jet quenching and compare their respective predictions with those of weakly coupled anisotropic plasmas.