Electromagnetic signatures of a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma

Understand

In heavy-ion collisions, quark-gluon plasma is likely to be produced with sizable initial pressure anisotropy, which may leave an imprint on electromagnetic observables.

• In order to model a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma, we use the AdS/CFT correspondence to calculate the current-current correlator of a weakly gauged U(1) subgroup of R symmetry in an N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma with a (temporarily) fixed anisotropy.
• The dual geometry, obtained previously by Janik and Witaszczyk, contains a naked singularity which however permits purely infalling boundary conditions and therefore the usual definition of a retarded correlator.
• We obtain numerical results for the cases of wave vector parallel and orthogonal to the direction of anisotropy, and we compare with previous isotropic results.