Holographic quark–antiquark potential in hot, anisotropic Yang–Mills plasma

Abstract

Using the gauge/gravity duality we calculate the heavy quark–antiquark potential in a hot, anisotropic and strongly coupled Yang–Mills plasma in (3+1)-dimensions. As the anisotropic medium we take a deformed version of N=4 super Yang–Mills theory at finite temperature following a recent work where the dual type IIB supergravity solution is also proposed. We turn on a small value of the anisotropy parameter, for which the gravity dual is known analytically (perturbatively), and compute the velocity-dependent quark–antiquark interaction potential when the pair is moving through the plasma with a velocity v. By setting v=0 we recover the static quark–antiquark potential. We numerically study how the potential is modified in the presence of anisotropy. We further show numerically how the quark–antiquark separation (both in the static and the velocity-dependent case) and hence, the screening length gets modified by anisotropy. We discuss various cases depending upon the direction of the dipole and the direction of its propagation and make a comparative study of these cases. We are also able to obtain an analytical expression for the screening length of the dipole moving in a hot, anisotropic plasma in a special case.