Heavy quark energy loss and D-Mesons at RHIC and LHC energies

TL;DR

This paper calculates the radiative energy loss of heavy quarks in quark-gluon plasma and compares the results with experimental data from RHIC and LHC, showing good agreement.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized gluon emission spectrum to evaluate heavy quark energy loss and applies it to analyze D-meson suppression at collider energies.

Findings

Heavy quarks lose energy similarly to light quarks via gluon radiation.

The calculated nuclear modification factor matches ALICE and RHIC data.

Collisional energy loss also contributes to D-meson suppression.

Abstract

We obtain the radiative energy loss of a heavy quark in a deconfined medium due to radiation of gluons off them using a recently derived generalised gluon emission spectrum. We find that the heavy flavour loses energy almost in a similar fashion like light quarks through this process. With this, we further analyse the nuclear modification factor for D-meson at LHC and RHIC energies. In particular, the obtained result is found to be in close agreement with the most recent data from ALICE collaboration at 2.76 ATeV Pb-Pb collisions. We also discuss the nuclear modification factor due to the collisional energy loss. Furthermore, the result of non-photonic single electron from the decay of both D and B mesons is compared with the RHIC data at 200 AGeV Au-Au collisions, which is also in close agreement.