Collisional and radiative energy loss in small systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model for energy loss in small collision systems, highlighting the dominance of elastic energy loss and its sensitivity to theoretical assumptions, with implications for understanding particle suppression in high-energy nuclear collisions.

Contribution

The paper develops a comprehensive energy loss model incorporating small system corrections and provides a novel expansion of nuclear modification factors in terms of energy loss distribution moments.

Findings

Elastic energy loss dominates suppression in small systems.

$R_{AB}$ is insensitive to the form of the energy loss distribution.

Significant theoretical uncertainty due to the crossover in elastic energy loss calculations.

Abstract

We present an energy loss model which includes small system size corrections to both the radiative and elastic energy loss. Our model is used to compute the nuclear modification factor $R_{AB}$ of light and heavy flavor hadrons, averaged over realistic collision geometries for central and peripheral $A+A$ and central $p / d / {}^3\text{He} + A$ collisions at LHC and RHIC. We find that the predicted suppression in small systems is almost entirely due to elastic energy loss. Our results are keenly sensitive to the crossover between elastic energy loss calculated with hard thermal loop propagators and vacuum propagators, respectively, which leads to a large theoretical uncertainty. We find that the $R_{AB}$ is largely insensitive to the form of the elastic energy loss distribution - Gaussian or Poisson - surprisingly so in small systems where the central limit theorem is inapplicable. We present an expansion of the $R_{AB}$ in terms of the moments of the energy loss probability distribution, which allows for a rigorous understanding of the dependence of the $R_{AB}$ on the underlying energy loss distribution.