Enhancing the Jet Quenching Parameter from Marginal Deformations

A number of recent papers have applied the AdS/CFT correspondence to a strong-coupling calculation of the medium-induced radiative parton energy loss in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC. The predicted value of the "jet quenching parameter" q, however, is rather small compared to the experimental results. For hot N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, certain marginal deformations can have the effect of enhancing q. This result is highly sensitive to the location of the fundamental string's endpoints in the internal space.