Heavy flavor suppression in a dynamical QCD medium with finite magnetic mass

TL;DR

This paper extends the dynamical energy loss formalism for jet quenching in heavy ion collisions to include non-zero magnetic mass, revealing a fundamental constraint and aligning predictions with experimental data.

Contribution

The authors generalize the energy loss formalism to incorporate non-zero magnetic mass, providing a more accurate model consistent with lattice QCD and experimental results.

Findings

Magnetic mass can be non-zero in QCD medium.

The generalized model constrains electric to magnetic mass ratio.

Predictions agree with RHIC and LHC jet suppression data.

Abstract

Reliable predictions for jet quenching in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions require accurate computation of radiative energy loss. While all available energy loss calculations assume zero magnetic mass, in accordance with the one-loop perturbative calculations, different non-perturbative approaches report a non-zero magnetic mass at RHIC and LHC. We generalized the dynamical energy loss formalism, to consistently include a possibility for existence of non-zero magnetic screening. We show that this generalization indicates a fundamental constraint on electric to magnetic mass ratio, which appears to be supported by lattice QCD simulations. Jet suppression patterns, obtained from this newly developed generalization, show reasonable agreement with the available RHIC and LHC measurements.