Screening in Strongly Coupled Plasmas: Universal Properties from Strings in Curved Space

We use the gauge/gravity correspondence to study the screening of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in various strongly coupled plasmas. Besides N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and the corresponding AdS_5 space we also study theories obtained as deformations of AdS_5, among them in particular a class of deformations solving supergravity equations of motion. We consider the dependence of the screening distance on the velocity and the orientation of the pair in the plasma. The value of the screening distance in N=4 SYM is found to be a minimum in the class of theories under consideration for all kinematic parameters.