2008/06/02 by D. E. Kharzeev, Dmitri E. Kharzeev, Kharzeev, D. E.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph #hep-th #nucl-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0806.0358
15 pages, no figures; corrected 2 typos
openalex publication_date 2008/06/02 · arxiv created 2008/06/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has been shown through the AdS/CFT correspondence that the energy loss of a fast quark in a strongly coupled \cal N=4 SUSY Yang--Mills matter in the large N limit is given by the classical Lienard formula. I demonstrate that under quite natural assumptions about the dynamics of heavy ion collisions this leads to a universal (i.e. independent of the initial parton energy, but dependent on flavor and centrality) upper bound on the energy of the partons escaping from the plasma. This bound is a Yang--Mills analog of the Pomeranchuk bound in classical electrodynamics, where it is a consequence of radiation in a strong external field acting on a relativistic charge. Since as a result the massive constituent partons are slowed down to a velocity v < c, the angular distribution of the emitted radiation exhibits a broad "dead cone". If the properties of conformal and QCD matter at strong coupling are qualitatively similar, the existence of this universal upper bound would have dramatic implications for heavy ion experiments.