Light quark energy loss in strongly-coupled N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma

Abstract

We compute the penetration depth of a light quark moving through a large $N_c$, strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma using gauge/gravity duality and a combination of analytic and numerical techniques. We find that the maximum distance a quark with energy $E$ can travel through a plasma is given by $\Delta x(E)=(\mathcal{C}/T)(E/T\sqrt{\lambda }{)}^{1/3}$ with $\mathcal{C}\approx 0.5$.

Comments: 19 pages, 7 figures. Added discussion, published version