Effect of heavy-quark energy loss on the muon differential production cross section in Pb-Pb collisions at \sqrtsNN=5.5 TeV

Abstract

We study the nuclear modification factors RAA and RCP of the high transverse momentum 5<pt<60 GeV/c distribution of muons in Pb--Pb collisions at LHC energies. We consider two pseudo-rapidity ranges covered by the LHC experiments: $|\eta |<2.5$ and $2.5<\eta <4$. Muons from semi-leptonic decays of heavy quarks (c and b) and from leptonic decays of weak gauge bosons (W and Z) are the main contributions to the muon pt distribution above a few GeV/c. We compute the heavy quark contributions using available pQCD-based programs. We include the nuclear shadowing modification of the parton distribution functions and the in-medium radiative energy loss for heavy quarks, using the mass-dependent BDMPS quenching weights. Muons from W and Z leptonic decays, that dominate the yield at high pt, can be used as a medium-blind reference to observe the medium-induced suppression of beauty quarks.

References in corpus (7)

• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Thermal Dileptons at LHC
• Heavy-Quark Kinetics in the QGP at LHC
• Collisional dissociation of heavy mesons in dense QCD matter
• Heavy quark jet quenching with collisional plus radiative energy loss and path length fluctuations
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• Studying the energy loss of heavy quarks via single muon production in PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$=5.5 TeV

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Productions of $Z^0$ and $W^{+}/W^{-}$ in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC
• Vector bosons in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC