Screening length and the direction of plasma winds

Abstract

We study the screening length of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in strongly coupled gauge theory plasmas flowing at velocity v following a proposal by Liu, Rajagopal, and Wiedemann. We analyze the screening length as the direction of the plasma winds vary. To leading order in v, this angle-dependence can be studied analytically for many theories by extending our previous formalism. We show that the screening length is locally a minimum (maximum) when the pair is perpendicular (parallel) to the plasma winds, which has been observed for the N=4 plasma. Also, we compare AdS/CFT results with weak coupling ones, and we discuss the subleading dependence on v for the Dp-brane.