Conformal holography of bulk elliptic flow and heavy-quark quenching in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We show that the ``perfect fluid'' elliptic flow of the bulk hadrons and the unexpectedly strong quenching of heavy quark jet fragments in Au $+$ Au reactions at $200A$ GeV can be simultaneously accounted for within leading-order anti-de-Sitter space/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) holography with a common large t'Hooft coupling $\ensuremath{\lambda}={g}_{\mathit{YM}}^{2}{N}_{c}~30$. In contrast, weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma models have so far failed to describe the observed correlation between these soft and hard observables even for couplings extrapolated to ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{s}~0.5$. We show that phenomenological applications of the classical trailing string AdS/CFT holographic solution are furthermore remarkably robust to higher-order curvature corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/{\ensuremath{\lambda}}^{3/2})$ in type IIB supergravity theories, as well as to worldsheet fluctuation corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/{\ensuremath{\lambda}}^{1/2})$ that were not considered previously. We emphasize the importance of future measurements at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the correlation between identified charm and beauty quark hard (${p}_{T}>10\ensuremath{-}30$ GeV) jet quenching observables and low transverse momenta (${p}_{T}\ensuremath{\leqslant}1$ GeV) bulk elliptic flow observables to further test the limits of the applicability of conformal holography to strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma.