Anomalous conical di-jet correlations in pQCD vs AdS/CFT

We propose an identified heavy quark jet observable to discriminate between weakly coupled pQCD and strongly coupled AdS/CFT models of quark-gluon plasma dynamics in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. These models are shown to predict qualitatively different associated hadron correlations with respect to tagged heavy quark jets. While both models feature similar far zone Mach and diffusion wakes, the far zone stress features are shown to be too weak to survive thermal broadening at hadron freeze-out. However, these models differ significantly in a near zone Neck region where strong chromo-fields sourced by the heavy quark jet couple to the polarizable plasma. Conical associated correlations, if any, are shown to be dominated by the jet induced transverse flow in the Neck zone and unrelated to the weak far zone wakes. Unlike in AdS/CR we show that the induced transverse flow in the Neck zone is too weak in pQCD to produce conical correlations after Cooper-Frye freeze-out. The observation of conical correlations violating Mach's law would favor the strongly-coupled AdS/CFT string drag dynamics, while their absence would favor weakly-coupled pQCD-based chromo-hydrodynamics. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.