Revisiting heavy quark radiative energy loss in nuclei within the high-twist approach

TL;DR

This paper improves the theoretical understanding of heavy quark energy loss in nuclei by deriving a new correction term within the high-twist formalism, highlighting its significance over previous models and approximations.

Contribution

It introduces a new correction term for medium-modified heavy quark fragmentation functions ensuring gauge invariance, advancing the high-twist approach for heavy quark energy loss.

Findings

The new correction term significantly affects heavy quark energy loss calculations.

The results are consistent with light quark energy loss in the massless limit.

Numerical analysis shows the importance of the correction term beyond soft gluon approximation.

Abstract

We revisit the calculation of multiple parton scattering of a heavy quark in nuclei within the framework of recently improved high-twist factorization formalism, in which gauge invariance is ensured by a delicate setup of the initial partons' transverse momenta. We derive a new result for medium modified heavy quark fragmentation functions in deeply inelastic scattering. It is consistent with the previous calculation of light quark energy loss in the massless limit, but leads to a new correction term in the heavy quark case, which vanishes in the soft gluon radiation limit. We show numerically the significance of the new correction term in the calculation of heavy quark energy loss as compared to previous studies and with soft gluon radiation approximation.