Speaker
Description
Unexpectedly strong suppression of heavy flavored mesons, produced with high transverse momenta in heavy ion collisions, is caused by final state interactions in the created dense medium. Gluon bremsstrahlung by a highly virtual heavy quark ceases shortly after the hard collision in accordance with perturbative QCD calculations and LEP measurements of the fragmentation function. Nevertheless, within a dense medium hadronization lasts a much longer time than in vacuum, due to prompt multiple breakups of a large-size heavy-light meson, which has a very short mean free pass in the dense medium. This and the specific shape of the heavy quark fragmentation function explains the observed strong suppression of D and B mesons produced in heavy ion collisions.
