Speaker
Krishna Rajagopal
(Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (US))
Description
We present calculations in which a light quark shoots through a finite
slab of strongly coupled $\mathcal{N} = 4 $ supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma, with thickness $L$,
focussing on what comes out on the other side. We find that even when the "jets'"
that emerge from the plasma have lost a substantial fraction of their energy they
look in almost all respects like "jets" in vacuum with the same reduced energy.
The one possible exception is that the opening angle of the "jet" is larger after
passage through the slab of plasma than before. Along the way, we obtain a
fully geometric characterization of energy loss in the strongly coupled plasma and
show that $dE_{\rm out}/dL$ is proportional to $L^2/\sqrt{x_{\rm stop}^2-L^2}$,
where $E_{\rm out}$ is
the energy of the "jet" that emerges from the slab of plasma and $x_{\rm stop}$ is
the (previously known) stopping distance for the light quark in an infinite volume of
plasma.
Author
Krishna Rajagopal
(Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (US))
Co-author
Paul Chesler
(MIT)
