Energy loss and thermalization of heavy quarks in a strongly-coupled plasma

Abstract

Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we compute the medium-induced energy loss of a decelerating heavy quark moving through a strongly-coupled supersymmetric Yang Mills plasma. In the regime where the deceleration is small, a perturbative calculation is possible and we obtain the first two corrections to the energy-loss rate of a heavy quark with constant velocity. The thermalization of the heavy quark is also discussed.

Comments: 4 pages, no figures, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus Nucleus Collisions (QM09), Knoxville, USA, March 30-April 4 2009