Heavy Flavor Suppression: Boltzmann vs Langevin

Abstract: The propagation of heavy flavor through the quark gluon plasma has been treated commonly within the framework of Langevin dynamics, i.e. assuming the heavy flavor momentum transfer is much smaller than the light one. On the other hand a similar suppression factor $R_{AA}$ has been observed experimentally for light and heavy flavors. We present a thorough study of the approximations involved by Langevin equation by mean of a direct comparison with the full collisional integral within the framework of Boltzmann transport equation. We have compared the results obtained in both approaches which can differ substantially for charm quark leading to quite different values extracted for the heavy quark diffusion coefficient. In the case of bottom quark the approximation appears to be quite reasonable.