Jet quenching and the gravity dual

Abstract

We compute the momentum broadening of an energetic parton as it moves through strongly interacting matter, using the gravity dual of a non conformal gauge theory with matter in the fundamental representation. Our approach defines a family of theories, all of which have logarithmic running of the couplings in the far IR but becomes almost conformal in the far UV. For a given set of degrees of freedom, we obtain average transverse momentum square of the parton as a function of temperature and compare with results obtained from the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee