https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-021-00636-z
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Effect of thermal gluon absorption and medium fluctuations on heavy flavour nuclear modification factor at RHIC and LHC energies
Department of Physics, Kent State University, 44242, Kent, OH, USA
a ashikhep@gmail.com, asheikh2@kent.edu
Received:
13
September
2021
Accepted:
23
November
2021
Published online:
6
December
2021
The presence of thermal gluons reduces the stimulated gluon emission off a heavy quark propagating in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) while absorption causes reduction of the radiative energy loss. On the other hand, the chromo-electromagnetic field fluctuations present in the QGP lead to collisional energy gain of the heavy quark. The net effect of the thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations is a reduction of the total energy loss of the heavy quark, prominent at the lower momenta. We consider both kind of the energy gains along with the usual losses, and compute the nuclear modification factor (
) of heavy mesons, viz., D and B mesons. The calculations have been compared with the experimental measurements in Au–Au collisions at 
GeV from STAR and PHENIX experiments at the RHIC and Pb–Pb collisions at 
TeV and 5.02 TeV from CMS and ALICE experiments at the LHC. We find a significant effect of the total energy gain due to thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations on heavy flavour suppression, especially at the lower transverse momenta.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021
