Heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions from soft collinear effective theory

Abstract

We review a new approach to open heavy flavor production in heavy ion collisions based on Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET). We include both finite heavy quark masses in the SCET Lagrangian and Glauber gluons that describe the interaction of collinear partons with the hot and dense QCD medium. From the new effective field theory, we derive massive in-medium splitting kernels and propose a new framework for including in-medium interactions consistent with next-to-leading order calculations in QCD. We present numerical results for the suppression of $D$- and $B$-mesons and compare to results obtained within the traditional approach to parton energy loss. We find good agreement when comparing to existing data from the LHC at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV and 2.76 TeV.