Phenomenology and theory of strongly coupled heavy quark energy loss

Abstract: Heavy quarks are ideal probes of the quark–gluon plasma: they are created early, lose energy as they traverse the medium, and eventually hadronize. I will present a unified heavy-quark implementation within the Hybrid Model that stitches together the AdS/CFT energy-loss limits—massless (lightlike) and infinitely massive (trailing-string)—into a single ansatz valid for any heavy quark velocity allowing one to follow its dynamics from the ultra-relativistic limit to the Brownian motion regime. I will also discuss ongoing theoretical work for a unified calculation of the strongly coupled energy loss of a finite-mass quark using AdS/CFT. At late times gaussian momentum broadening satisfying the Einstein relation is included to allow late-time thermalization. Hadronization is modelled through a combination of coalescence with soft medium partons and fragmentation of Lund strings for those heavy quarks remaining color-connected to shower partons. Confronting our results with data, I will show results for the $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ of D- and B-mesons, the $Lambda_c/D^0$ ratio and b-jet $R_{AA}$. I will then discuss potential future heavy-quark-jet substructure measurements such as Lund-plane and EEC observables.