Novel mechanism for suppression of heavy flavored mesons in heavy ion collisions

Production of heavy flavored hadrons from fragmentation of heavy quarks represents an alternative probe for a medium created after heavy ion collisions. We demonstrate that observed strong suppression of heavy flavored D and B mesons, produced with high transverse momenta pT, is caused by final state interactions with such a medium. The space-time pattern of hadronization of a highly virtual heavy quark is controlled predominantly by intensive gluon radiation, which is ceased at a short time scale in accordance with perturbative QCD calculations and LEP measurements of the fragmentation functions. However, production of heavy flavored hadrons lasts a long time due to prompt multiple breakups of produced colorless (pre)hadrons in the medium. This fact together with the specific shape of heavy quark fragmentation function, peaked at large z, allows to explain the observed strong suppression of D and B mesons in a good accord with data.