Jet quenching in hot strongly coupled gauge theories simplified

Theoretical studies of jet stopping in strongly-coupled QCD-like plasmas have used gauge-gravity duality to find that the maximum stopping distance scales like E 1/3 for large jet energies E . In recent work studying jets that are created by finite-size sources in the gauge theory, we found an additional scale: the typical (as opposed to maximum) jet stopping distance scales like ( EL ) 1/4 , where L is the size of the space-time region where the jet is created. In this paper, we show that the results of our previous, somewhat involved computation in the gravity dual, and the ( EL ) 1/4 scale in particular, can be very easily reproduced and understood in terms of the distance that high-energy particles travel in AdS 5 -Schwarzschild space before falling into the black brane. We also investigate how stopping distances depend on the conformal dimension of the source operator used to create the jet.