Flavor dependence of jet quenching in pp collisions and its effect on RAA for heavy mesons

Abstract

The flavor dependence of the medium modification factor R_pp for pp collisions has been studied for a scenario with formation of a small-size quark-gluon plasma (QGP) for RHIC (\(\sqrt s \)= 0.2 TeV) and LHC (\(\sqrt s \)= 2.76 TeV) energies. It has been found that at p_T ~ 10 GeV the pion spectrum is suppressed by ~20–30 (25–35)% for RHIC (LHC), for D (B) mesons the suppression effect is smaller by a factor of ~0.7–0.8 (0.5). The flavor hierarchy R_pp^π < R_pp^D < R_pp^B is held at p_T ≲ 20 GeV for RHIC and at p_T ≲ 70 GeV for LHC. This gives a significant reduction of the heavy-to-light ratios of the nuclear modification factors R_AA as compared to that in the standard scenario without the QGP production in pp collisions.