Energy Loss of Heavy Quarks from Asymptotically AdS Geometries

TL;DR

The paper addresses heavy-quark energy loss in strongly coupled plasmas using holography, deploying a general asymptotically $AdS_{d+1}$ metric with horizons to capture finite temperature and $U(1)_R$ chemical potential. It develops both analytic and linearized trailing-string analyses to extract the friction coefficient $\mu$ and the kinetic mass $M_{\rm kin}$, establishing a dispersion relation $E = M_{\rm rest} + \frac{P^2}{2M_{\rm kin}}$ and showing universal scalings such as $\mu M_{\rm kin} = \sqrt{\lambda}\left(\dfrac{s^2}{2\pi N^4}\right)^{1/3}$ in AdS$_5$ settings. The work further analyzes a concrete R-charged D3-brane background, demonstrating that $\mu$ is not monotone in chemical potential and that there is nontrivial velocity dependence when chemical potential is finite, supported by both analytic expressions for moving quarks and numerical quasinormal-mode computations. Together, these results reveal universal features and bounds for quark damping in holographic plasmas and illustrate how chemical potential and velocity modify energy dissipation in strongly coupled gauge theories.

Abstract

We investigate some universal features of AdS/CFT models of heavy quark energy loss. In addition, as a specific example, we examine quark damping in the spinning D3-brane solution dual to N=4 SU(N_c) super Yang-Mills at finite temperature and R-charge chemical potential.