Velocity Dependence of Baryon Screening in a Hot Strongly Coupled Plasma

Understand

The L-dependence of the static potential between Nc quarks arranged in a circle of radius L (a "baryon") immersed in the hot plasma of a gauge theory with Nc colors defines a screening length Ls.

• We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to compute this screening length for the case of heavy quarks in the plasma of strongly coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills theory moving with velocity v relative to the baryon.
• We find that in the v -> 1 limit, Ls \propto (1-v^2)^{1/4}/T, and find that corrections to this velocity dependence are small at lower velocities.
• This result provides evidence for the robustness of the analogous behavior of the screening length defined by the static quark-antiquark pair, which has been computed previously and in QCD is relevant to quarkonium physics in heavy ion collisions.