Drag Induced Radiation and Multi-Stage Effects in Heavy-Flavor Energy Loss

Abstract

It is argued that heavy-quarks traversing a Quark Gluon Plasma, undergo a multi-stage modification process, similar to the case of light flavors. Such an approach is applied to heavy-quark energy loss, which includes a rare-scattering, multiple emission formalism at momenta large compared to the mass (sensitive only to the transverse diffusion coefficient $\hat{q}$), and a single scattering induced emission formalism (Gunion-Bertsch) at momenta comparable to the mass of the quark [sensitive to $\hat{q}$, and the longitudinal drag ($\hat{e}$) and diffusion ($\hat{e}_2$) coefficients]. The application of such a multi-stage approach within a 2+1D viscous fluid-dynamical simulation leads to simultaneous agreement with experimental data for the nuclear modification factor of both $B$ and $D$ mesons, as measured by the CMS collaboration at the LHC. The extracted transport coefficients are found to be consistent with those for light flavors.

6 pages, 3 figures