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 200 AGeV can be simultaneously accounted for within leading order AdS/CFT holography with a common large t'Hooft coupling $\lambda=g^2_{YM} N_c \sim 30$. 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 $\alpha_s\sim 0.5$. We show that phenomenological applications of the classical trailing string AdS/CFT holographic solution are furthermore remarkably robust to higher order curvature corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/\lambda^{3/2})$ in type IIB supergravity theories, as well as to worldsheet fluctuation corrections $\mathcal{O}(1/\lambda^{1/2})$ that were not considered previously. We emphasize the importance of future measurements at RHIC and LHC of the correlation between {\em identified} charm and beauty quark hard ($p_T > 10-30$ GeV) jet quenching observables and low transverse momenta ($p_T\le 1$ GeV) bulk elliptic flow observables to further tests the limits of applicability of conformal holography to strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma.