4 research outputs found
Shockwaves and deep inelastic scattering within the gauge/gravity duality
Within the gauge/gravity correspondence, we discuss the general formulation
of the shockwave metric which is dual to a 'nucleus' described by the
strongly-coupled N=4 SYM theory in the limit where the number of colors Nc is
arbitrarily large. We emphasize that the 'nucleus' must possess Nc^2 degrees of
freedom per unit volume, so like a finite-temperature plasma, in order for a
supergravity description to exist. We critically reassess previous proposals
for introducing transverse inhomogeneity in the shockwave and formulate a new
proposal in that sense, which involves no external source but requires the
introduction of an 'infrared' cutoff which mimics confinement. This cutoff
however plays no role when the shockwave is probed by a highly virtual
projectile, so like in deep inelastic scattering. We consider two such
projectiles, the dilaton and the R-current, and compute the respective
structure functions including unitarity corrections. We find that there are no
leading-twist contributions to the structure functions at high virtuality,
meaning that there are no point-like constituents in the strongly coupled
'nucleus'. In the black-disk regime at low virtuality, the structure functions
are suggestive of parton saturation with occupation numbers of order one. The
saturation momentum Qs grows with the energy like Qs^2 ~ 1/x (with x the
Bjorken variable), which is the hallmark of graviton exchanges and is also
necessary for the fulfillment of the energy-momentum sum rules.Comment: 43 page