This page was written as a supplement to the heavy quark damping paper . The QuickTime movies hopefully help to illustrate the dual gravitational behavior of these heavy quarks.

I wrote some code that uses Mathematica's NDSolve routine to solve the partial differential equation governing a string both in pure five dimensional AdS and also the black D3-brane background. The string has two endpoints on a D7-brane which correspond to a quark and antiquark pair. For simplicity, the string is taken to lie in a two dimensional spatial slice of the geometry, extending only in the radial direction of AdS and one other space-like direction.

These first two movies are for the string in pure AdS. (Click on the pictures for the movie.) Thus, the string is dual to a quark-antiquark pair at zero temperature added to N=4 super Yang Mills theory. In the formalism of the quark damping paper, the quarks have 0.628 of their binding energy. (The initial conditions were pointlike with A=0.2 and a D7-brane ending at z=0.5.)

In this last movie, we zoom in on the time where the string collapses back on itself. Notice the formation of cusps.

The following movie corresponds to a quark-antiquark pair at finite temperature in the N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma. At finite temperature, a black hole horizon appears, which we take to lie at z=1. The strings are given considerably more than their binding energy (about 7 times). (The D7-brane in this run was taken to end at z=0.75.)

Notice that at late times, the end points of the string move more and more slowly.