Holographic Brownian motion and time scales in strongly coupled plasmas

We study Brownian motion of a heavy quark in field theory plasma in the AdS/CFT setup and discuss the time scales characterizing the interaction between the Brownian particle and plasma constituents. Based on a simple kinetic theory, we first argue that the mean-free-path time is related to the connected 4-point function of the random force felt by the Brownian particle. Then, by holographically computing the 4-point function and regularizing the IR divergence appearing in the computation, we write down a general formula for the mean-free-path time, and apply it to the STU black hole which corresponds to plasma charged under three U(1) R-charges. The result indicates that the Brownian particle collides with many plasma constituents simultaneously. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Funded by SCOAP(3).