An overview of heavy quark energy loss puzzle at RHIC

Abstract

We give a theoretical overview of the heavy quark tomography puzzle posed by recent non-photonic single electron data from central Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200$ AGeV. We show that radiative energy loss mechanisms alone are not able to explain large single electron suppression data, as long as realistic parameter values are assumed. We argue that combined collisional and radiative pQCD approach can solve a substantial part of the non-photonic single electron puzzle.

Comments: 8 pages, 7 figures; To appear in the proceedings of International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM2006), Los Angeles, California, 26-31 Mar 2006