11th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

We present predictions for the suppression of D and B-mesons at $\sqrt{s}=5.5$ TeV at the LHC in Pb+Pb collisions. We assume that the QGP is strongly coupled, and show the centrality and momentum dependence of the nuclear modification factor at midrapidity. We quantify the systematic theoretical uncertainties associated with the mapping of parameters in $N=4$ SYM theory to QCD, as well as the momentum dependence of the diffusion coefficient in AdS/CFT. We also present results of the corresponding $v_2(p_T)$ for D and B-mesons describing this azimuthal anisotropy for central, semi-central and peripheral collisions. We show that the suppression and azimuthal anisotropy predictions are qualitatively consistent with LHC measurements. In addition, we show that coupling energy loss to flow increases $v_2$ substantially out to surprisingly large momenta, on the order of $\sim 25$ GeV/c, thus pointing to a possible resolution of the $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ puzzle at intermediate $p_T$ for light hadrons.