Dynamical heavy-quark recombination and the nonphotonic single-electron puzzle at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)

We show that the single, nonphotonic electron nuclear modification factor RAAe is affected by the thermal enhancement of the heavy-baryon-to-heavy-meson ratio in relativistic heavy-ion collisions with respect to proton-proton collisions. We make use of the dynamical quark recombination model to compute such a ratio and show that this produces a sizable suppression factor for RAAe at intermediate transverse momenta. We argue that this suppression factor needs to be considered, in addition to the energy loss contribution, in calculations of RAAe. © 2009 The American Physical Society.