Abstract
Models of medium-induced radiative parton energy loss account for the strong suppression of high- hadron spectra in Au-Au collisions at BNL RHIC in terms of a single “jet quenching parameter” . We observe that can be given a model-independent, nonperturbative, quantum field theoretic definition in terms of the short-distance behavior of a particular lightlike Wilson loop. We then use the anti–de Sitter/conformal-field-theory correspondence to obtain a strong-coupling calculation of in hot supersymmetric QCD, finding in the limit in which both and are large. Thus, at strong coupling is not proportional to the entropy density , or to some “number density of scatterers” since, unlike the number of degrees of freedom, does not grow like .
- Received 24 May 2006
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.182301
©2006 American Physical Society