Jet quenching for heavy flavors in $AA$ and $pp$ collisions

Abstract

We perform a global analysis of experimental data on jet quenching for heavy flavors for scenarios with and without quark-gluon plasma formation in $pp$ collisions. We find that the theoretical predictions for the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ for heavy flavors at the LHC energies are very similar for these scenarios, and the results for $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ agree reasonably with the LHC data. The agreement with data at the RHIC top energy becomes somewhat better for the intermediate scenario, in which the quark-gluon plasma formation in $pp$ collisions occurs only at the LHC energies. Our fits to heavy flavor $R_{AA}$ show that description of jet quenching for heavy flavors requires somewhat bigger ${\alpha }_s$ than data on jet quenching for light hadrons.

Comments: 15 pages, 12 figures