Suppression of high transverse momentum D mesons in central Pb--Pb collisions at \(\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76\) TeV

Abstract

The production of the prompt charm mesons \(D^0\), \(D^+\), \(D^{*+}\), and their antiparticles, was measured with the ALICE detector in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, at a centre-of-mass energy \(\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76\) TeV per nucleon--nucleon collision. The \(p_t\)-differential production yields in the range \(2<p_t<16\) GeV/c at central rapidity, \(|y|<0.5\), were used to calculate the nuclear modification factor \(R_{AA}\) with respect to a proton-proton reference obtained from the cross section measured at \(\sqrt{s}=7\) TeV and scaled to \(\sqrt{s}=2.76\) TeV. For the three meson species, \(R_{AA}\) shows a suppression by a factor 3-4, for transverse momenta larger than 5 GeV/c in the 20% most central collisions. The suppression is reduced for peripheral collisions.