Shock Treatment: Heavy Quark Drag in a Novel AdS Geometry

Understand

We calculate the drag force on a heavy quark hit by a shock wave, thus generalizing the strongly coupled AdS/CFT heavy quark drag calculations to both hot and cold nuclear matter.

• The derivation employs the trailing string configuration, similar to that used in the literature for a quark moving through a thermal medium, though in the shock metric the string profile is described by a much simpler analytic function.
• Our expression for the drag depends on the typical transverse momentum scale of the matter in the shock.
• For a thermal medium this scale becomes proportional to the temperature, making our drag coefficient and momentum limit of applicability identical to those found previously.