Wake of a heavy quark in non-Abelian plasmas: Comparing kinetic theory and the anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence
Author(s)
Hong, Juhee; Teaney, Derek; Chesler, Paul Michael
DownloadHong-2012-Wake of a heavy quark in non-Abelian plasmas.pdf (732.9Kb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
We compute the nonequilibrium stress tensor induced by a heavy quark moving through weakly coupled QCD plasma at the speed of light and compare the result to N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory at strong coupling. The QCD Boltzmann equation is reformulated as a Fokker-Planck equation in a leading logarithmic approximation, which is used to compute the induced stress. The transition from nonequilibrium at short distances to equilibrium at long distances is analyzed with first- and second-order hydrodynamics. Even after accounting for the obvious differences in shear lengths, the strongly coupled theory is significantly better described by hydrodynamics at subasymptotic distances. We argue that this difference between the kinetic and the anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theories is related to the second-order hydrodynamic coefficient τ[subscript π]. τ[subscript π] is numerically large in units of the shear length for theories based on the Boltzmann equation.
Date issued
2012-06Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical PhysicsJournal
Physical Review C
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Hong, Juhee, Derek Teaney, and Paul Chesler. “Wake of a Heavy Quark in non-Abelian Plasmas: Comparing Kinetic Theory and the Anti-de Sitter Space/conformal Field Theory Correspondence.” Physical Review C 85.6 (2012). ©2012 American Physical Society
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0556-2813
1089-490X