Dragging Heavy Quarks in Quark Gluon Plasma at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper calculates the drag and diffusion of heavy quarks in quark-gluon plasma at LHC, incorporating radiative and collisional energy loss, and evaluates their impact on electron spectra from heavy hadron decays.

Contribution

It introduces an effective approach combining radiative and collisional energy loss to solve the Fokker-Planck equation for heavy quarks in QGP.

Findings

Effective transport coefficients are derived for heavy quarks.

The nuclear suppression factor $R_{AA}$ is computed for non-photonic electrons.

Mass effects on $R_{AA}$ are analyzed.

Abstract

The drag and diffusion coefficients of charm and bottom quarks propagating through quark gluon plasma (QGP) have been evaluated for conditions relevant to nuclear collisions at Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The dead cone and Landau-Pomeronchuk-Migdal (LPM) effects on radiative energy loss of heavy quarks have been considered. Both radiative and collisional processes of energy loss are included in the {\it effective} drag and diffusion coefficients. With these effective transport coefficients we solve the Fokker Plank (FP) equation for the heavy quarks executing Brownian motion in the QGP. The solution of the FP equation has been used to evaluate the nuclear suppression factor, $R_{\mathrm AA}$ for the non-photonic single electron spectra resulting from the semi-leptonic decays of hadrons containing charm and bottom quarks. The effects of mass on $R_{\mathrm AA}$ has also been highlighted.