English

An AdS/CFT Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-11-26 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory Nuclear Theory

Abstract

One of the challenges in relating experimental measurements of the suppression in the number of J/\psi mesons produced in heavy ion collisions to lattice QCD calculations is that whereas the lattice calculations treat J/\psi mesons at rest, in a heavy ion collision a c\bar c pair can have a significant velocity with respect to the hot fluid produced in the collision. The putative J/\psi finds itself in a hot wind. We present the first rigorous non-perturbative calculation of the consequences of a wind velocity v on the screening length L_s for a heavy quark-antiquark pair in hot N=4 supersymmetric QCD. We find L_s(v,T) = f(v)[1-v^2]^{1/4}/\pi T with f(v) only mildly dependent on v and the wind direction. This L_s(v,T)\sim L_s(0,T)/\sqrt{\gamma} velocity scaling, if realized in QCD, provides a significant additional source of J/\Psi suppression at transverse momenta which are high but within experimental reach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0607062,
  title  = {An AdS/CFT Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind},
  author = {Hong Liu and Krishna Rajagopal and Urs Achim Wiedemann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0607062},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures. v3: Significant additions, including a new figure, giving an illustrative example of the effect of the velocity scaling of the screening length on J/Psi suppression in heavy ion collisions