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/psi mesons produced in heavy ion collisions to lattice QCD calculations is that whereas the lattice calculations treat J/psi mesons at rest, in a heavy ion collision a cc[over ] pair can have a significant velocity with respect to the hot fluid produced in the collision. The putative J/psi 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 L(s) for a heavy quark-antiquark pair in hot N=4 supersymmetric QCD. We find L(s)(v,T)=f(v)[1-v(2)](1/4)/piT with f(v) only mildly dependent on v and the wind direction. This L(s)(v,T) approximately L(s)(0,T)/sqrt[gamma] velocity scaling, if realized in QCD, provides a significant additional source of J/psi suppression at transverse momenta which are high but within experimental reach.