Heavy quark in an expanding plasma in AdS/CFT

G. C. Giecold

Published 2009-04-12, updated 2009-05-25Version 2

Using the Janik-Peschanski dual to a Bjorken flow, a Langevin equation is derived for a heavy quark in an expanding N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma. Such a plasma is characterized by a proper-time dependence of the temperature and corresponds to a system out of equilibrium. The analysis first focuses on a quark at rest in the plasma comoving frame. The case of a quark moving across a longitudinally expanding plasma is then considered. The two-point functions for the random noise acting on such heavy quark probes are computed.