Heavy Quark Production and Energy Loss

TL;DR

This paper compares theoretical models of heavy quark energy loss in quark-gluon plasma, highlighting the differences between weakly and strongly coupled approaches and their agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It explicitly demonstrates the utility of heavy flavor measurements to distinguish between weakly and strongly coupled plasma models using pQCD and AdS/CFT frameworks.

Findings

Weakly-coupled plasma model broadly agrees with data.

Strongly-coupled plasma model struggles to match experimental results.

Energy loss predictions vary significantly between models.

Abstract

Heavy flavor research is a vigorous and active topic in high-energy QCD physics. Comparing theoretical predictions to data as a function of flavor provides a unique opportunity to tease out properties of quark-gluon plasma. We explicitly demonstrate this utility with energy loss predictions based on the assumption of 1) a weakly-coupled plasma weakly coupled to a high-pT probe using pQCD and 2) a strongly-coupled plasma strongly coupled to a high-pT probe using AdS/CFT; we find that while the former enjoys broad qualitative agreement with data, it is difficult to reconcile the latter with experimental measurements.