Multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in p+A collisions at backward rapidity

• DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2014.11.024
• Publication Date: 2014-11-21T01:56:43Z
• Authors: Zhong-Bo Kang; Ivan Vitev; Enke Wang; Hongxi Xing; Cheng Zhang
• Keywords: Nuclear and High Energy Physics; Nuclear Theory; Physics; QC1-999; FOS: Physical sciences; 01 natural sciences; High Energy Physics - Experiment; Nuclear Theory (nucl-th); High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex); High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); 0103 physical sciences; Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex); Nuclear Experiment

We study the incoherent multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in the backward rapidity region of p+A collisions within the generalized high-twist factorization formalism. We calculate explicitly the double scattering contributions to the heavy meson differential cross sections by taking into account both initial-state and final-state interactions, and find that these corrections are positive. We further evaluate the nuclear modification factor for muons that come form the semi-leptonic decays of heavy flavor mesons. Phenomenological applications in d+Au collisions at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV at RHIC and in p+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV at the LHC are presented. We find that incoherent multiple scattering can describe rather well the observed nuclear enhancement in the intermediate $p_T$ region for such reactions.<br/>10 pages, 6 figures, published version in PLB<br/>