Speaker
Peter Arnold
(University of Virginia)
Description
A very basic theoretical question is: How far does a high-energy excitation travel in a quark-gluon plasma, and how does that distance scale with energy? In weak coupling, the stopping distance scales with energy as E^(1/2), up to logarithms. In strongly-coupled plasmas with gravity duals, theorists have found that the maximum stopping distance scales instead like E^(1/3). In the latter case, we show that there can be an important distinction between typical and maximum stopping distances. For the strongly-coupled excitations we study, we find that the typical stopping distance scales as E^(1/4).
Primary author
Peter Arnold
(University of Virginia)
Co-author
Diana Vaman
(University of Virginia)
