Quarkonium transport in thermal AdS/CFT

Abstract

We consider a heavy meson moving slowly through high temperature non-abelian plasmas. Using a simple dipole effective Lagrangian, we calculate the in-medium mass shift and the drag coefficient of the meson in $N=4$ Super Yang Mills theory at weak and strong coupling. As anticipated, in the large $N$ limit the mass shift is finite while the drag is suppressed by $1/N^2$ . After comparing results to perturbative QCD estimates (which are also calculated), we reach the conclusion that relative to weak coupling expectations the effect of strong coupling is to reduce the momentum diffusion rate and to {it increase} the relaxation time by up to a factor of four.