Anti–de Sitter/Conformal-Field-Theory Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind

One of the challenges in relating experimental measurements of the suppression in the number of J/ψ mesons produced in heavy ion collisions to lattice QCD calculations is that whereas the lattice calculations treat J/ψ mesons at rest, in a heavy ion collision a cc̅ pair can have a significant velocity with respect to the hot fluid produced in the collision. The putative J/ψ finds itself in a hot wind. We present the first rigorous nonperturbative calculation of the consequences of a wind velocity v on the screening length Ls for a heavy quark-antiquark pair in hot N=4 supersymmetric QCD. We find Ls(v,T)=f(v)[1-v2]1/4/πT with f(v) only mildly dependent on v and the wind direction. This Ls(v,T)∼Ls(0,T)/sqrt[γ] velocity scaling, if realized in QCD, provides a significant additional source of J/ψ suppression at transverse momenta which are high but within experimental reach.