Drag of heavy quarks in quark gluon plasma at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Abstract

The drag and diffusion coefficients of charm and bottom quarks propagating through quark gluon plasma (QGP) have been evaluated for conditions relevant to nuclear collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The dead cone and Landau-Pomeronchuk-Migdal (LPM) effects on radiative energy loss of heavy quarks have been considered. Both radiative and collisional processes of energy loss are included in the effective drag and diffusion coefficients. With these effective transport coefficients, we solve the Fokker-Plank (FP) equation for the heavy quarks executing Brownian motion in the QGP. The solution of the FP equation has been used to evaluate the nuclear suppression factor, ${R}_{\mathrm{AA}},$ for the nonphotonic single-electron spectra resulting from the semileptonic decays of hadrons containing charm and bottom quarks. The effects of mass on ${R}_{\mathrm{AA}}$ have also been highlighted.