Nuclear suppression of muons at forward rapidity at relativistic heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Heavy quarks produced in the initial stage of heavy ion collisions would traverse the quark gluon plasma, colliding with quarks and gluons and radiating gluons. In the process of collision with the quarks and gluons and also by radiation of gluons they lose energy. After their production, they may get fragmented into heavy mesons by picking up light quarks/antiquarks and in turn may decay through leptonic channels. These leptons would carry information of the initial stage of heavy ion collisions and also the evolution of the plasma. In this work, we have made a detailed study for the nuclear modification factor of production of muons from the initial fusion of partons in a nuclear collision at LHC energy. We also present our result for the azimuthal anisotropy of heavy quark decay muons at LHC energy. We consider both the radiative and collision energy loss along with longitudinal expansion of the plasma for these calculations. We compare our results of muon RAA for Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 ATeV with ALICE data and results of muon v2 for Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 ATeV with ALICE preliminary data.