High momentum hadron suppression is considered to be an excellent probe of
jet-medium interactions in QCD matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion
collisions. We previously showed that our dynamical energy loss formalism can
accurately explain suppression measurements at 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC
and 2.76 TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC. With the upcoming LHC measurements at
notably higher collision energies, there is a question of what differences,
with respect to the current (2.76 TeV) measurements, can be expected. In this
paper we concentrate on heavy flavor suppression at the upcoming 5.1 TeV Pb+Pb
collisions energy at the LHC. Naively, one would expect a notably (∼30%)
larger suppression at 5.1 TeV collision energy, due to estimated (significant)
energy loss increase when transitioning from 2.76 to 5.1 TeV. Surprisingly,
more detailed calculations predict nearly the same suppression results at these
two energies. We show that this unexpected result is due to an interplay of the
following two effects, which essentially cancel each other: i) flattening of
the initial distributions with increasing collision energies, and ii)
significantly slower than naively expected increase in the energy loss.
Therefore, the obtained nearly the same suppression provides a clear
(qualitative and quantitative) test of our energy loss formalism.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
