Holography for Heavy Quarks and Mesons at Finite Chemical Potential

Abstract

We study the properties of heavy quarks as probes of strongly coupled plasmas with and without chemical potential by means of the gauge/gravity (AdS/CFT) duality. We compute the screening distance of a heavy quark-antiquark pair, its free energy, and the running coupling in large classes of non-conformal models arising as deformations of pure AdS space. We further investigate the energy loss of a heavy quark moving on a circular orbit as an example of an accelerated motion. These observables exhibit universal features independent of the deformation, pointing to strong-coupling universality. Our results should be relevant for processes involving heavy quarks and their bound states in the quark-gluon plasma, including the case of finite net baryon density.

Comments: 10 pages, talk presented by C.E. at 9th International Workshop on Critical Point and Onset of Deconfinement (CPOD2014), Bielefeld, November 2014, arXiv version contains minor corrections