Absorption lengths in the holographic plasma

We consider the effect of a periodic perturbation with frequency omega on the holographic N = 4 plasm are presented by the planar AdS blackhole. The response of the system is given by exponentially decaying waves. The corresponding complex wave numbers can be found by solving wave equations in the AdS black hole background with infalling boundary conditions on the horizon in an analogous way as in the calculation of quasinormal modes. The complex momentum eigenvalues have an interpretation as poles of the retarded Green's functions, where the inverse of the imaginary part gives an absorption length lambda. At zero frequency we obtain the screening length for a static field. These are directly related to the glueball masses in the dimensionally reduced theory. We also point out that the longest screening length corresponds to an operator with non-vanishing R-charge and thus does not have an interpretation as a QCD(3) glueball.