Heavy flavour energy loss from AdS/CFT in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC

Abstract

We present predictions for heavy flavour suppression, flow, and azimuthal correlations in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC of two AdS/CFT based energy loss models sensitive to thermal fluctuations. While both models are in good agreement with B-meson suppression measurements from the LHC, only the model with a diffusion coefficent independent of the heavy quark's velocity is in agreement with measurements of D-meson suppression at high pT. The partonic azimuthal correlations are compared with those from perturbative QCD based simulations up to $20\text{GeV}$. When restricted to leading order production processes, we find that the strongly coupled correlations of high transverse momentum pairs ($>4\text{GeV}$) are broadened less efficiently than the corresponding weak coupling based correlations, while low transverse momentum pairs ($1-4\text{GeV}$) are broadened with similar efficiency, but with an order of magnitude more particles ending up in this momentum class. We thus propose heavy flavour momentum correlations as a distinguishing observable of weakly- and strongly-coupled energy loss mechanisms.