Shock Treatment: Heavy Quark Energy Loss in a Novel AdS/CFT Geometry

Abstract

We first note the failures of traditional pQCD techniques as applied to high-pT heavy ion physics and the suggestion of examining the double ratio of charm to bottom nuclear modification factors to generically distinguish between these weak coupling ideas and the strong coupling ideas of AdS/CFT. In order to gain confidence in the use of AdS/CFT (and to increase the likelihood of falsifying it and/or pQCD) we extend its application to heavy quark energy loss in both thermal and nonthermal media by calculating the string drag in a shock metric.

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee. Only change from v1 is removal of line numbering