Quenching and flow of charm and bottom quarks via semi-leptonic decay of D and B mesons in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC* * Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12225503, 11935007, 11890710, 11890711, 12175122, 2021-867). W.-J. X. is supported in part by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023M742099). Some of the calculations were performed in the Nuclear Science Computing Center at Central China Normal University (NSC3), Wuhan, Hubei, China

Abstract

Heavy flavor particles provide important probes of the microscopic structure and thermodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. We studied the energy loss and flow of charm and bottom quarks inside the QGP via the nuclear modification factor ( ) and elliptic flow coefficient ( ) of their decayed leptons in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. The dynamical evolution of the QGP was performed using the CLVisc (3+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamics model; the evolution of heavy quarks inside the QGP was simulated with our improved Langevin model that considers both collisional and radiative energy loss of heavy quarks; the hadronization of heavy quarks was simulated via our hybrid coalescence-fragmentation model; and the semi-leptonic decay of D and B mesons was simulated via PYTHIA. Using the same spatial diffusion coefficient for charm and bottom quarks, we obtained smaller and larger of charm decayed leptons than bottom decayed leptons, indicating stronger energy loss of charm quarks than bottom quarks inside the QGP within our current model setup.