The Influence of Initial State Fluctuations on Heavy Quark Energy Loss   in Relativistic Heavy-ion Collisions
  We study the effects of initial state fluctuations on the dynamical evolution of heavy quarks inside a quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The evolution of heavy quarks in QGP matter is described utilizing a modified Langevin equation that incorporates the contributions from both collisional and radiative energy loss. The spacetime evolution of the fireball medium is simulated with a (2+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamic model. We find that when the medium traversed by the heavy quark contains a fixed amount of energy, heavy quarks tend to lose more energy for greater fluctuations of the medium density. This may result in a larger suppression of heavy flavor observables in a fluctuating QGP matter than in a smooth one. The possibility of using hard probes to infer the information of initial states of heavy-ion collisions is discussed. 
Shanshan Cao, Yajing Huang, Guang-You Qin, and Steffen A. Bass
nucl-th nucl-ex