Probing Two Holographic Models of Strongly Coupled Anisotropic Plasma

Abstract

Quark-gluon plasma during its initial phase after its production in heavy-ion collisions is expected to have substantial pressure anisotropies. In order to model this situation by a strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma with fixed anisotropy by means of AdS/CFT duality, two models have been discussed in the literature. Janik and Witaszczyk have considered a geometry involving a comparatively benign naked singularity, while more recently Mateos and Trancanelli have used a regular geometry involving a nontrivial axion field dual to a parity-odd deformation of the gauge theory by a spatially varying theta parameter. We study the (rather different) implications of these two models on the heavy-quark potential as well as jet quenching and compare their respective predictions with those of weakly coupled anisotropic plasmas.