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 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 {\it 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 non-photonic single electron spectra resulting from the semi-leptonic decays of hadrons containing charm and bottom quarks. The effects of mass on $R_{\mathrm AA}$ has also been highlighted.