Complex suppression patterns distinguish between major energy loss effects in Quark-Gluon Plasma

TL;DR

This paper analyzes complex suppression patterns in Quark-Gluon Plasma, showing how different energy loss mechanisms like collisional, radiative, and dead-cone effects explain experimental observations and predicting future B meson behavior.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework that reproduces suppression patterns and distinguishes between energy loss mechanisms in Quark-Gluon Plasma, including predictions for B mesons.

Findings

Suppression curves are reproduced by the model.

Complex patterns arise from interplay of energy loss mechanisms.

Predictions for B mesons' suppression across all momentum ranges.

Abstract

Interactions of high momentum partons with Quark-Gluon Plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions provide an excellent tomography tool for this new form of matter. Recent measurements for charged hadrons and unidentified jets at the LHC show an unexpected flattening of the suppression curves at high momentum, exhibited when either momentum or the collision centrality is changed. Furthermore, a limited data available for B probes indicate a qualitatively different pattern, as nearly the same flattening is exhibited for the curves corresponding to two opposite momentum ranges. We here show that the experimentally measured suppression curves are well reproduced by our theoretical predictions, and that the complex suppression patterns are due to an interplay of collisional, radiative energy loss and the dead-cone effect. Furthermore, for B mesons, we predict that the uniform flattening of the suppression indicated by the limited dataset is in fact valid across the entire span of the momentum ranges, which will be tested by the upcoming experiments. Overall, the study presented here, provides a rare opportunity for pQCD theory to qualitatively distinguish between the major energy loss mechanisms at the same (nonintuitive) dataset.