  Quark-gluon plasma during its initial phase after its production in heavy-ion
collisions is expected to have substantial pressure anisotropies. In order to
model this situation by a strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma with
fixed anisotropy by means of AdS/CFT duality, two models have been discussed in
the literature. Janik and Witaszczyk have considered a geometry involving a
comparatively benign naked singularity, while more recently Mateos and
Trancanelli have used a regular geometry involving a nontrivial axion field
dual to a parity-odd deformation of the gauge theory by a spatially varying
theta parameter. We study the (rather different) implications of these two
models on the heavy-quark potential as well as jet quenching and compare their
respective predictions with those of weakly coupled anisotropic plasmas.
