Collisional energy loss of heavy quarks

TL;DR

This paper presents a transport model for heavy quarks in quark-gluon plasma, incorporating quantum effects and screening, and evaluates their energy loss and flow characteristics at RHIC energies.

Contribution

It introduces an improved binary collision-based transport approach with quantum statistics and effective screening, providing new insights into heavy quark energy loss mechanisms.

Findings

Heavy flavor nuclear modification factor calculated

Elliptic flow comparable to radiative effects

Analytic formula for mean collisional energy loss

Abstract

We develop a transport approach for heavy quarks in a quark-gluon plasma, which is based on improved binary collision rates taking into account quantum statistics, the running of the QCD coupling and an effective screening mass adjusted to hard-thermal loop calculations. We quantify the effects of in-medium collisions by calculating the heavy flavor nuclear modification factor and the elliptic flow for RHIC energies, which are comparable to radiative effects. We also derive an analytic formula for the mean collisional energy loss of an energetic heavy quark in a streaming quark gluon plasma.