Holographic quark-antiquark potential in hot, anisotropic Yang-Mills plasma

Abstract: Using the gauge/gravity duality we calculate the heavy quark-antiquark potential in a hot, anisotropic and strongly coupled Yang-Mills plasma in (3+1)-dimensions. As the anisotropic medium we take a deformed version of \mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature following a recent work where the dual type IIB supergravity solution is also proposed. We turn on a small value of the anisotropy parameter, for which the gravity dual is known analytically (perturbatively), and compute the velocity-dependent quark-antiquark interaction potential when the pair is moving through the plasma with a velocity v. By setting v = 0 we recover the static quark-antiquark potential. We numerically study how the potential is modified in the presence of anisotropy. We further show numerically how the quark-antiquark separation (both in the static and the velocity-dependent case) and hence, the screening length gets modified by anisotropy. We discuss various cases depending upon the direction of the dipole and the direction of its propagation and make a comparative study of these cases. We are also able to obtain an analytical expression for the screening length of the dipole moving in a hot, anisotropic plasma in a special case.