Suppression of Heavy Quarks in Heavy-ion Collisions ⋆

Heavy quark drag coefficients in a quark-gluon plasma due to three-body elastic scattering have recently been approximately evaluated in the lowest order in QCD. For both charm and bottom quarks, their values are found to be comparable to those from two-body elastic scattering. In the Fokker-Planck approach based on a schematic expanding fireball model, its effect on the transverse momentum spectra of heavy quarks produced from Au+Au collisions at center of mass energy has been studied, and the results show that adding contributions from heavy quark three-body scattering to those due to two-body elastic and radiative scattering brings the nuclear modification factor for electrons from heavy meson decays closer to available experimental data.