  We explore phenomenological signatures of light quark jet quenching within
the AdS/CFT correspondence. Numerical studies of the instantaneous energy loss
of light quarks, modeled as falling strings, suggest a linear path dependence.
We propose a phenomenological model for the energy loss and use it to compute
the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for light quarks in an expanding
plasma with Glauber initial conditions. The results are compared to the light
hadron $R_{AA}$ data at the LHC and, although they show qualitative agreement,
the quantitative disagreement we found motivated the exploration of effects
from higher order derivative corrections to $AdS_5$ on this observable.
