Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Heavy quark energy loss near the QCD phase transition

Jorge Noronha

Columbia University

After briefly reviewing the major discoveries related to the quenching of jets at RHIC, I will show how the gauge/gravity duality can be used to describe jet quenching in a strongly-coupled non-Abelian plasma. Heavy quark jet observables are shown to be extremely sensitive to the magnitude of the trace anomaly in a strongly-coupled plasma. I will present some “predictions” for the nuclear modification factor of tagged heavy quark jets at RHIC computed using a bottom-up gravity dual model whose thermodynamic properties are tuned to match current lattice QCD data.