Heavy Flavour Energy Loss in Small and Large Systems

Abstract

We present suppression results for high-$p_T$ $D$ and $\pi$ mesons produced in $p / d + A$ and $A+A$ collisions at RHIC and LHC. These results are computed using a convolved elastic and radiative energy loss model, which receives small system size corrections to both the elastic and radiative energy loss. We observe that suppression in small systems is almost entirely due to elastic energy loss; furthermore, we find that our model is acutely sensitive to the transition between hard thermal loop and vacuum propagators in the elastic energy loss. Finally, we consider the central limit theorem approximation, which is commonly used to model the elastic energy loss distribution as Gaussian.