Falling Strings and Light Quark Jet Quenching at LHC

We explore phenomenological signatures of light quark jet quenching within the AdS/CFT correspondence. Numerical studies of the instantaneous energy loss of light quarks, modeled as falling strings, suggest a linear path dependence. We propose a phenomenological model for the energy loss and use it to compute the nuclear modification factor R-AA for light quarks in an expanding plasma with Glauber initial conditions. The results are compared to the light hadron R-AA data at the LHC and, although they show qualitative agreement, the quantitative disagreement we found motivated the exploration of effects from higher order derivative corrections to AdS(5) on this observable.