Heavy quark jet tomography of the ultradense sQGP phase of nuclear matter Original Research Article

Heavy quark jet quenching in high energy nuclear collisions became a decisive tool to distinguish between theories based on Standard Model perturbative QCD and AdS/CFT gravity dual models. The momentum independence and inverse quark mass dependence of the drag coefficient in AdS/CFT differs substantially from the characteristic log(pT/M)/pT variation of the heavy quark drag in QCD, which was obtained from early calculations. The latest pQCD efforts on heavy quark energy loss include color magnetic dynamical effects and final size non-static coherence effects in perturbative quark gluon plasmas and the obtained results are much closer to the experimental data for heavy quarks. We discuss our recent understanding of heavy quark quenching and summarize the measurable quantities to distinguish between the pQCD and AdS/CFT scenarios.