Open heavy flavor at RHIC and LHC in a partonic transport model

TL;DR

This paper uses a partonic transport model to study heavy quark behavior in quark-gluon plasma, finding that including radiative processes improves agreement with experimental data from RHIC and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed 3+1D simulation of heavy quark dynamics incorporating radiative processes, enhancing the understanding of heavy flavor suppression and flow.

Findings

Binary interactions alone do not match experimental data.

Applying a K factor of 4 improves model-data agreement.

Radiative processes lead to stronger suppression consistent with measurements.

Abstract

Heavy quarks are a unique probe to study the medium produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Within the partonic transport model Boltzmann approach to multi-parton scatterings (BAMPS) the production, energy loss and elliptic flow of heavy quarks are investigated in 3+1 dimensional simulations of the quark gluon plasma evolution. With only binary interactions between heavy quarks and particles from the medium calculated within perturbative QCD, the results on elliptic flow and the nuclear modification factor are not compatible with experimental data from RHIC and LHC. However, if the binary cross section is multiplied with K=4 both the elliptic flow and the nuclear modification factor are simultaneously described at RHIC and also LHC. Furthermore, preliminary results are presented that the implementation of radiative processes leads to a stronger suppression which agrees well with the measured nuclear modification factor at RHIC without the need of any K factor.