Heavy Quark Production and Energy Loss

Heavy flavor research is a vigorous and active topic in high-energy QCD physics. Comparing theoretical predictions to data as a function of flavor provides a unique opportunity to tease out properties of quark-gluon plasma. We explicitly demonstrate this utility with energy loss predictions based on the assumption of 1) a weakly-coupled plasma weakly coupled to a high-pT probe using pQCD and 2) a strongly-coupled plasma strongly coupled to a high-pT probe using AdS/CFT; we find that while the former enjoys broad qualitative agreement with data, it is difficult to reconcile the latter with experimental measurements.