Heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions from soft collinear effective theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework based on Soft Collinear Effective Theory to analyze heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions, incorporating finite quark masses and medium interactions, and compares results with experimental data.

Contribution

It develops a new effective field theory approach for heavy flavor production that includes finite quark masses and medium effects, aligning with next-to-leading order QCD calculations.

Findings

Good agreement with LHC data on D- and B-meson suppression

Derivation of massive in-medium splitting kernels

Proposes a consistent framework for in-medium interactions

Abstract

We review a new approach to open heavy flavor production in heavy ion collisions based on Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET). We include both finite heavy quark masses in the SCET Lagrangian and Glauber gluons that describe the interaction of collinear partons with the hot and dense QCD medium. From the new effective field theory, we derive massive in-medium splitting kernels and propose a new framework for including in-medium interactions consistent with next-to-leading order calculations in QCD. We present numerical results for the suppression of $D$- and $B$-mesons and compare to results obtained within the traditional approach to parton energy loss. We find good agreement when comparing to existing data from the LHC at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV and 2.76 TeV.