Speaker
Description
Heavy meson production in reactions with nuclei is a new frontier to understand QCD dynamics and hadronization in nuclear matter. Measurements in various colliding systems, including Pb-Pb, Xe-Xe, O-O, p-Pb, and p-O at the LHC and the upcoming sPHENIX experiment, enable precision tests of the medium-size, temperature, and mass dependencies of the in-medium QCD evolution. We employ a coupled DGLAP evolution framework that takes advantage of splitting functions recently obtained in SCET${}_G$ and HTL-motivated collisional energy loss effects. With the jet-medium couplings constrained to the nuclear modification factor of charged hadrons $R_{AA}$ in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, we present predictions for heavy-meson $R_{AA}$ in Xe-Xe, O-O and p-Pb collisions at the LHC. We find suppression that scales non-trivially with the quark mass and medium properties. In particular, there can be sizeable collision-induced attenuation of heavy mesons in small systems such as oxygen-oxygen and high-multiplicity $p$-Pb events. Finally, we analyze the impact of different models of initial-state parton dynamics on the search for QGP signatures in small colliding systems.
| Submitted on behalf of a Collaboration? | No |
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