Multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in p+A collisions at backward rapidity

Abstract

We study the incoherent multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in the backward rapidity region of p+A collisions within the generalized high-twist factorization formalism. We calculate explicitly the double scattering contributions to the heavy meson differential cross sections by taking into account both initial-state and final-state interactions, and find that these corrections are positive. We further evaluate the nuclear modification factor for muons that come form the semi-leptonic decays of heavy flavor mesons. Phenomenological applications in d+Au collisions at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV at RHIC and in p+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV at the LHC are presented. We find that incoherent multiple scattering can describe rather well the observed nuclear enhancement in the intermediate $p_T$ region for such reactions.