Jet Quenching in Non-Conformal Holography

We use our non-conformal holographic bottom-up model for QCD described in 1012.0116 to further study the effect of the QCD trace anomaly on the energy loss of both light and heavy quarks in a strongly coupled plasma. We compute the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for bottom and charm quarks in an expanding plasma with Glauber initial conditions. We find that the maximum stopping distance of light quarks in a non-conformal plasma scales with the energy with a temperature (and energy) dependent effective power.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings for Quark Matter 201

Holographic isotropisation in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We study holographic isotropisation of homogeneous, strongly coupled, non-Abelian plasmas in Gauss-Bonnet gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We focus on small values of the Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter λGB and linearise the equations of motion around a time-dependent background solution with λGB = 0. We numerically solve the linearised equations and show that the entire time evolution of the pressure anisotropy can be well approximated by the linear in λGB corrections to the quasinormal mode expansion, even in the cases of high anisotropy. We finally show that, quite generally, the time evolution of the pressure anisotropy with the Gauss-Bonnet term is approximately shifted with respect to the evolution without it, with the sign of the shift being directly related to the sign of the λGB parameter. Combined with the observation that negative λGB captures qualitative features of positive gauge coupling corrections, this suggests that the latter generically increase the isotropisation time of strongly coupled plasmas

Jet Tomography versus Holography at RHIC and LHC

We compare pQCD based jet tomography to AdS/CFT based jet holography approach to address the heavy quark jet puzzle and discuss future tests at RHIC and LHC that could help decide which paradigm can provide the most consistent quantitative theory to explain modification of jet observabkles in high energy nuclear collisions