Photon-tagged heavy meson production in high energy nuclear collisions

Understand

We study the photon-triggered light and heavy meson production in both p+p and A+A collisions.

• We find that a parton energy loss approach that successfully describes inclusive hadron attenuation in nucleus-nucleus reactions at RHIC can simultaneously describe well the experimentally determined photon-triggered light hadron fragmentation functions.
• Using the same framework, we generalize our formalism to study photon-triggered heavy meson production.
• We find that the nuclear modification of photon-tagged heavy meson fragmentation functions in A+A collision is very different from that of the photon-tagged light hadron case.