Jet quenching in hot strongly coupled gauge theories revisited: 3-point correlators with gauge-gravity duality

Abstract

Previous studies of high-energy jet stopping in strongly-coupled plasmas have lacked a clear gauge-theory specification of the initial state. We show how to set up a well-defined gauge theory problem to study jet stopping in pure {\cal N}=4 super Yang Mills theory (somewhat analogous to Hofman and Maldacena's studies at zero temperature) and solve it by using gauge-gravity duality for real-time, finite-temperature 3-point correlators. Previous studies have found that the stopping distance scales with energy as E^{1/3} (with disagreement on the gauge coupling dependence). We do find that none of the jet survives beyond this scale, but we find that almost all of our jet stops at a parametrically smaller scale proportional to (E L)^{1/4}, where L is the size of the space-time region where the jet is initially created.

Comments: 53 pages, 13 figures [Change from v1: A factor of 2 normalization error is corrected in our intermediate calculations, starting from (2.12). Final results are not affected. The other changes are minor and cosmetic.]