Dynamical heavy-quark recombination and the non-photonic single electron puzzle at RHIC

Abstract

We show that the single, non-photonic electron nuclear modification factor R e AA is affected by the thermal enhancement of the heavy-baryon to heavy-meson ratio in relativistic heavy-ion collisions with respect to proton-proton collisions. We make use of the dynamical quark recombination model to compute such ratio and show that this produces a sizable suppression factor for R e AA at intermediate transverse momenta. We argue that such suppression factor needs to be considered, in addition to the energy loss contribution, in calculations of R e AA .