The Imaginary Part of the Static Potential in Strongly Coupled Anisotropic Plasma

TL;DR

This study uses gauge/gravity duality to analyze how anisotropy in a strongly coupled plasma affects the imaginary part of the static potential, revealing a decrease in thermal width influenced by anisotropic conditions.

Contribution

It derives a general formula for the imaginary potential in anisotropic backgrounds and explores its behavior in a specific axion-induced anisotropic theory.

Findings

Imaginary potential exhibits a turning point similar to the real part.

Anisotropy generally decreases the imaginary potential.

Thermal width decreases with anisotropy, regardless of the comparison scheme.

Abstract

Using the gauge/gravity duality we study the imaginary part of the static potential associated to the thermal width in finite temperature strongly coupled anisotropic plasma. We firstly derive the potential for a generic anisotropic background. Then we apply our formulas to a theory where the anisotropy has been generated by a space dependent axion term. We find that using our method there exist a peculiar turning point in the imaginary part of the potential, similar to the one appearing in the real part. The presence of anisotropy leads to decrease of the imaginary potential, where larger decrease happens along the anisotropic direction when the temperature is kept fixed. When the entropy density is fixed, increase happens along the parallel direction while along the transverse plane we observe a decrease. To estimate the thermal width we use an approximate extrapolation beyond the turning point and we find a decrease in presence of the anisotropy, independently of the comparison scheme used.