Nuclear modification factor for light and heavy flavors within pQCD and recent data from the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different flavors of particles are suppressed in heavy-ion collisions at LHC energies, using pQCD calculations that include radiative and collisional energy loss, and compares results with recent experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed pQCD-based analysis of flavor-dependent nuclear modification factors, incorporating running coupling and energy loss mechanisms, aligning theory with recent LHC measurements.

Findings

Radiative energy loss dominates the suppression of high-energy particles.

pQCD calculations agree reasonably with LHC data for various particle flavors.

The flavor dependence of $R_{AA}$ is well described by the model.

Abstract

We examine the flavor dependence of the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ in the pQCD calculations at LHC energies. The computations are performed accounting for radiative and collisional parton energy loss with running coupling constant. Our results show that the recent LHC data on the $R_{AA}$ for charged hadrons, D-mesons and non-photonic electrons agree reasonably with the pQCD picture of the parton energy loss with the dominating contribution from the radiative mechanism.