Heavy Flavour Energy Loss in Small and Large Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the suppression of high-$p_T$ $D$ and $C6$ mesons in small and large collision systems at RHIC and LHC, highlighting the dominant role of elastic energy loss in small systems and the model's sensitivity to theoretical assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a convolved elastic and radiative energy loss model with small system size corrections, emphasizing elastic energy loss's importance in small systems.

Findings

Suppression in small systems is mainly due to elastic energy loss.

Model is highly sensitive to the transition between different propagator regimes.

The Gaussian approximation for elastic energy loss distribution is examined.

Abstract

We present suppression results for high-$p_T$ $D$ and $\pi$ mesons produced in $p / d + A$ and $A+A$ collisions at RHIC and LHC. These results are computed using a convolved elastic and radiative energy loss model, which receives small system size corrections to both the elastic and radiative energy loss. We observe that suppression in small systems is almost entirely due to elastic energy loss; furthermore, we find that our model is acutely sensitive to the transition between hard thermal loop and vacuum propagators in the elastic energy loss. Finally, we consider the central limit theorem approximation, which is commonly used to model the elastic energy loss distribution as Gaussian.