Effect of thermal gluon absorption and medium fluctuations on heavy flavour nuclear modification factor at RHIC and LHC energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal gluon absorption and medium fluctuations influence the energy loss and nuclear modification factor of heavy mesons in quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC energies, highlighting their significant impact at lower momenta.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model including both energy gains and losses from thermal gluons and field fluctuations to better explain heavy flavor suppression in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations reduce heavy quark energy loss.

Total energy gain significantly affects heavy flavor suppression at low transverse momentum.

Model results align well with experimental data from RHIC and LHC.

Abstract

The presence of thermal gluons reduces the stimulated gluon emission off a heavy quark propagating in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) while absorption causes reduction of the radiative energy loss. On the other hand, the chromo-electromagnetic field fluctuations present in the QGP lead to collisional energy gain of the heavy quark. The net effect of the thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations is a reduction of the total energy loss of the heavy quark, prominent at the lower momenta. We consider both kind of the energy gains along with the usual losses, and compute the nuclear modification factor ($R_{AA}$) of heavy mesons, viz., $D$ and $B$ mesons. The calculations have been compared with the experimental measurements in Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV from STAR and PHENIX experiments at the RHIC and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV and $5.02$ TeV from CMS and ALICE experiments at the LHC. We find a significant effect of the total energy gain due to thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations on heavy flavour suppression, especially at the lower transverse momenta.