Longitudinal dependence of open heavy flavor $R_\text{AA}$ in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the suppression of open heavy flavor particles varies with rapidity in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, revealing the influence of medium size and initial production spectrum on heavy quark energy loss.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed model of heavy quark transport using an improved Langevin approach combined with (3+1)D hydrodynamics to study rapidity dependence of heavy flavor suppression.

Findings

Rapidity dependence is influenced by medium size and initial spectrum.

Model predictions align with existing experimental data.

Provides forecasts for open heavy flavor $R_{AA}$ at various rapidities.

Abstract

Heavy flavor probes are sensitive to the properties of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A huge amount of effort has been devoted to studying different aspects of the heavy-ion collisions using heavy flavor particles. In this work, we study the dynamics of heavy quark transport in the QGP medium using the rapidity dependence of heavy flavor observables. We calculate the nuclear modification of $\text{B}$ and $\text{D}$ meson spectra as well as spectra of leptons from heavy flavor decays in the rapidity range $[-4.0,4.0]$. We use an implementation of the improved Langevin equation with gluon radiation on top of a (3+1)-dimensional relativistic viscous hydrodynamical background for several collision setups. We find that the rapidity dependence of the heavy quark modification is determined by the interplay between the smaller size of the medium, which affects the path length of the heavy quarks, and the softer heavy quark initial production spectrum. We compare our results with available experimental data and present predictions for open heavy flavor meson $R_\text{AA}$ at finite rapidity.