Heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions from soft collinear effective theory

Zhong-Bo Kang,Ivan Vitev,Felix Ringer

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/779/1/012029

Abstract

We review the approach to calculate open heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions based on Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET). We include both finite heavy quark masses in the SCET Lagrangian as well as Glauber gluons that describe the interaction of collinear partons with the hot and dense QCD medium. From the new effective field theory, we derive massive in-medium splitting kernels and we propose a new framework for including in-medium interactions consistent with next-to-leading order calculations in QCD. We present numerical results for the suppression of both D- and B-mesons and compare to results obtained within the traditional approach to parton energy loss. We find good agreement when comparing to existing data from the LHC at and 2.76 TeV.

Highlights

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) predicted to have existed in the early universe can be reproduced in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC
We present new theoretical calculations beyond the traditional framework of parton energy loss [4, 5, 6] based on recently developed techniques using Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) [7, 8, 9, 10]
We derived a new version of Soft Collinear Effective Theory including both finite heavy quark masses and the interaction of collinear partons with the medium that are mediated by Glauber gluon exchange [13]

Summary

Introduction

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) predicted to have existed in the early universe can be reproduced in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC. In [11, 15], an effective field theory based on SCET was developed in order to describe highly energetic massless partons traversing the QCD medium. Following the massless calculations in [15, 16, 17, 18], we derive massive in-medium splitting functions to first order in opacity. This can be achieved by formally defining medium modified fragmentation functions derived from the SCETM,G splitting functions. From the resulting Lagrangian, we can directly derive the massive vacuum splitting functions Q → Qg, Q → gQ and g → QQwhich were first obtained using traditional perturbative methods in QCD [30]. See [13] for a more detailed derivation

Numerical results and comparison to data

Conclusions