Dissipation from a heavy quark moving through N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma

Abstract

Using AdS/CFT, we compute the Fourier space profile of <tr F^2> generated by a heavy quark moving through a thermal plasma of strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory. We find evidence of a wake whose description includes gauge fields with large momenta. We comment on the possible relevance of our results to relativistic heavy ion collisions.

Comments: 17 pages, 2 figures. v2: reference added, other minor improvements. v3: improved the phrasing describing directional structures