How sensitive are high-pT electron spectra at RHIC to heavy quark energy loss?

By N. Armesto, Matteo Cacciari, A. Dainese, C. A. Salgado, U. Wiedemann. 2005

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In nucleus–nucleus collisions, high- p T electron spectra depend on the medium modified fragmentation of their massive quark parents, thus giving novel access to the predicted mass hierarchy of parton energy loss. Here we calculate these spectra in a model, which supplements the perturbative QCD factorization formalism with parton energy loss. In general, we find—within large errors—rough agreement between theory and data on the single inclusive electron spectrum in pp, its nuclear modification factor R A A e , and its azimuthal anisotropy v 2 e . However, the nuclear modification factor depends on the relative contribution of charm and bottom production, which we find to be affected by large perturbative uncertainties. In order for electron measurements to provide a significantly more stringent test of the expected mass hierarchy, one must then disentangle the b - and c -decay contributions, for instance by reconstructing the displaced decay vertices.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e505b4717fc284a450fc12db1ae904f7a9d84ac

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Suppression of high transverse momentum D mesons in central Pb-Pb collisions at root s(NN)=2.76 TeV (2012, background): “At RHIC, the suppression of heavy-flavour hadrons, measured indirectly from their inclusive decay electrons [28–30], was found to be compatible with that of pions and generally stronger than most expectations based on radiative energy loss [31, 32].”
Comparing the drag force on heavy quarks in N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory and QCD (2006, background): “The best agreement reported in [22] is with calculations along the lines of [29], but for charm quarks only.”
Momentum fluctuations of heavy quarks in the gauge-string duality (2006, methodology): “In any case, the STAR data are at least consistent with a more negative slope for RAA as a function of pT than either the c+ b or c only curves from [51].”
Strongly correlated quantum fluids: ultracold quantum gases, quantum chromodynamic plasmas and holographic duality (2012, background): “(a) RAA of heavy-flavor electrons in 0-10% central collisions [282] compared with π data [283] and model calculations (curves I [284], II [285], and III [286]).”