The ratio of nuclear modification factors of high-$p_T$ heavy-flavored mesons to light-flavored hadrons (“heavy-to-light ratio”) in nucleus-nucleus collisions tests the partonic mechanism expected to underlie jet quenching. Heavy-to-light ratios are mainly sensitive to the mass and color-charge dependences of medium-induced parton energy loss. Here, we assess the potential for identifying these two effects in $D$ and $B$ meson production at RHIC and at the LHC. To this end, we supplement the perturbative QCD factorized formalism for leading hadron production with radiative parton energy loss. For $D$ meson spectra at high but experimentally accessible transverse momentum ($10\lesssim p_T\lesssim 20\mathrm{GeV}$) in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, we find that charm quarks behave essentially like light quarks. However, since light-flavored hadron yields are dominated by gluon parents, the heavy-to-light ratio of $D$ mesons is a sensitive probe of the color-charge dependence of parton energy loss. In contrast, due to the larger $b$ quark mass, the medium modification of $B$ mesons in the same kinematical regime provides a sensitive test of the mass dependence of parton energy loss. At RHIC energies, the strategies for identifying and disentangling the color charge and mass dependence of parton energy loss are more involved because of the smaller kinematical range accessible. We argue that at RHIC, the kinematical regime best suited for such an analysis of $D$ mesons is $7\lesssim p_T\lesssim 12\mathrm{GeV}$, whereas the study of lower transverse momenta is further complicated due to the known dominant contribution of additional, particle species dependent, nonperturbative effects.

• Received 24 January 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.71.054027