Predictions of heavy-flavor suppression at 5.1 TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

© 2015 American Physical Society. High momentum hadron suppression is considered to be an excellent probe of jet-medium interactions in QCD matter created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. We previously showed that our dynamical energy loss formalism can accurately explain suppression measurements at 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and 2.76 TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With the upcoming LHC measurements at notably higher collision energies, there is a question of what differences, with respect to the current (2.76 TeV) measurements, can be expected. In this paper we concentrate on heavy flavor suppression at the upcoming 5.1 TeV Pb+Pb collisions energy at the LHC. Naively, one would expect a notably (∼30%) larger suppression at 5.1 TeV collision energy, due to estimated (significant) energy loss increase when transitioning from 2.76 to 5.1 TeV. Surprisingly, more detailed calculations predict nearly the same suppression results at these two energies. We show that this unexpected result is due to an interplay of the following two effects, which essentially cancel each other: (i) flattening of the initial charm and bottom momentum distributions with increasing collision energies, and (ii) significantly slower than naively expected increase in the energy loss. Therefore, the obtained theoretical predictions, which suggest nearly the same heavy flavor suppression at 2.76 and 5.1 TeV, provide a clear (qualitative and quantitative) test of our energy loss formalism.