Tomography of the Quark Gluon Plasma by Heavy Quarks

TL;DR

This paper uses a pQCD-based model to analyze heavy quark energy loss in the Quark Gluon Plasma, focusing on the centrality dependence of nuclear modification factors and comparing different theoretical approaches.

Contribution

It applies a recent collisional energy loss model to study heavy quark suppression and compares pQCD and AdS/CFT approaches for QGP tomography.

Findings

Model reproduces centrality dependence of R_AA

Comparison shows differences between pQCD and AdS/CFT results

Provides insights into heavy quark energy loss mechanisms

Abstract

Using the recently published model \cite{Gossiaux:2008jv,goss2} for the collisional energy loss of heavy quarks in a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), based on perturbative QCD (pQCD), we study the centrality dependence of $R_{AA}$ and $R_{AA}(p_T^{min})$, %= \frac{dN_{AA}/dp_T}{<N_{binary}> dN_{pp}/dp_T}$ measured by the Phenix collaboration, and compare our model with other approaches based on pQCD and on Anti de Sitter/ Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT)