Nuclear modification factor of D⁰mesons in PbPb collisions at s<inf>NN</inf>=5.02TeV

Abstract

The transverse momentum (pT) spectrum of prompt D0mesons and their antiparticles has been measured via the hadronic decay channels D0→K−π+and D‾0→K+π−in pp and PbPb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV per nucleon pair with the CMS detector at the LHC. The measurement is performed in the D0meson pTrange of 2–100GeV/c and in the rapidity range of |y|<1. The pp (PbPb) dataset used for this analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 27.4 pb−1(530 μb−1). The measured D0meson pTspectrum in pp collisions is well described by perturbative QCD calculations. The nuclear modification factor, comparing D0meson yields in PbPb and pp collisions, was extracted for both minimum-bias and the 10% most central PbPb interactions. For central events, the D0meson yield in the PbPb collisions is suppressed by a factor of 5–6 compared to the pp reference in the pTrange of 6–10GeV/c. For D0mesons in the high-pTrange of 60–100GeV/c, a significantly smaller suppression is observed. The results are also compared to theoretical calculations.