Suppressions of light and heavy flavor observables are considered to be
excellent probes of QCD matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion
collisions. Suppression predictions of quark and gluon jets appear to suggest a
clear hierarchy according to which neutral pions should be more suppressed than
D mesons, which in turn should be more suppressed than single electrons.
However, joint comparison of neutral pion (light probe) and non-photonic single
electron (heavy probe) suppression data at RHIC unexpectedly showed similar jet
suppression for these two probes, which presents the well-known heavy flavor
puzzle at RHIC. We here analyze which effects are responsible for this
unexpected result, by using the dynamical energy loss formalism. We find that
the main effect is a surprising reversal in the suppression hierarchy between
neutral pions and D mesons, which is due to the deformation of the suppression
patterns of light partons by fragmentation functions. Furthermore, we find
that, due to the decay functions, the single electron suppression approaches
the D meson suppression. Consequently, we propose that these two effects, taken
together, provide a clear intuitive explanation of this longstanding puzzle.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure
