Jet quenching for heavy flavors in $AA$ and $pp$ collisions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes jet quenching of heavy flavors in $AA$ and $pp$ collisions, comparing scenarios with and without quark-gluon plasma formation, and finds reasonable agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of heavy flavor jet quenching across different collision energies and scenarios, highlighting the impact of quark-gluon plasma formation in $pp$ collisions.

Findings

Similar $R_{AA}$ predictions for different scenarios at LHC energies.

Reasonable agreement of $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ with LHC data.

Better data agreement at RHIC energy when quark-gluon plasma forms only at LHC energies.

Abstract

We perform a global analysis of experimental data on jet quenching for heavy flavors for scenarios with and without quark-gluon plasma formation in $pp$ collisions. We find that the theoretical predictions for the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for heavy flavors at the LHC energies are very similar for these scenarios, and the results for $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ agree reasonably with the LHC data. The agreement with data at the RHIC top energy becomes somewhat better for the intermediate scenario, in which the quark-gluon plasma formation in $pp$ collisions occurs only at the LHC energies. Our fits to heavy flavor $R_{AA}$ show that description of jet quenching for heavy flavors requires somewhat bigger $\alpha_s$ than data on jet quenching for light hadrons.