The Energy Loss of a Heavy Quark Moving in a Viscous Fluid

Understand

To study the rate of energy and momentum loss of a heavy quark in QGP, specifically in the hydrodynamic regime, we use fluid/gravity duality and construct a perturbative procedure to find the string solution in gravity side.

• We show that by this construction the drag force exerted on the quark can be computed perturbatively, order by order in a boundary derivative expansion.
• At ideal order, our result is just the drag force exerted on a moving quark in thermal plasma with thermodynamics variables promoted to become local functions of space and time.
• Furthermore, we apply this procedure to a transverse quark in Bjorken flow and compute the first-derivative corrections, namely the viscous corrections, to the drag force.