  We examine the conditions for beaming of the gluonic field sourced by a heavy
quark in strongly-coupled conformal field theories, using the AdS/CFT
correspondence. Previous works have found that, contrary to naive expectations,
it is possible to set up collimated beams of gluonic radiation despite the
strong coupling. We show that, on the gravity side of the correspondence, this
follows directly (for arbitrary quark motion, and independently of any
approximations) from the fact that the string dual to the quark remains
unexpectedly close to the AdS boundary whenever the quark moves
ultra-relativistically. We also work out the validity conditions for a related
approximation scheme that proposed to explain the beaming effect though the
formation of shock waves in the bulk fields emitted by the string. We find that
these conditions are fulfilled in the case of ultra-relativistic uniform
circular motion that motivated the proposal, but unfortunately do not hold for
much more general quark trajectories.
