Collisional energy losses of heavy quarks in relativistic nuclear collisions at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

TL;DR

This paper studies the energy loss of heavy quarks in quark-gluon plasma at RHIC energies using analytic QCD models to explain the suppression of heavy mesons and electrons observed experimentally.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic QCD approach with an effective quasiparticle model to calculate heavy quark energy losses, addressing limitations of perturbative QCD at low momenta.

Findings

Heavy $B$ and $D$ mesons are significantly suppressed at moderate transverse momentum.

The model's predictions align with experimental suppression of nonphotonic electrons.

Analytic QCD models effectively describe heavy quark energy loss in quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

We investigate the energy losses of $b$ and $c$ quarks at hard collisions with gluons and light quarks in quark-gluon plasma produced in central $Au + Au$ collisions at RHIC energy($\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV). As the coupling constant at hard collision in the perturbative QCD is limited by Landau pole at momenta $Q^{2} = \Lambda^{2}$, we use the analytic models of QCD, where the Landau pole is absent. We calculate the energy losses of $b$ and $c$ quarks in analytic model of QCD at $Q^{2} \ge \Lambda^{2}$. At calculations we use the effective quasiparticle model. We use at calculations of total nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}^{b+c}$ the fragmentation of $b$ and $c$ quarks into heavy hadrons with accounting theirs energy losses. We show that this factor gives the considerably suppression of heavy $B$ and $D$ mesons in the region of middle meanings of $p_{\perp}$. The experimental data \cite{2} show, that nonphotonic electrons have the analogous suppression in the same region of $p_{\perp}$.