Non-conformal holography of heavy quark quenching

We develop a holographic (bottom-up) gravity model for QCD to understand the connection between the peak in the trace anomaly and the magnitude of heavy quark energy loss in a strongly-coupled plasma. The potential of the scalar field on the gravity side is constructed to reproduce some properties of QCD at finite temperature and its parameters are constrained by fitting lattice gauge theory results. The energy loss of heavy quarks (as predicted by the holographic model) is found to be strongly sensitive to the medium properties.