Multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in p plus A collisions at backward rapidity

We study the incoherent multiple scattering effects on heavy meson production in the backward rapidity region of p+A collisions within the generalized high-twist factorization formalism. We calculate explicitly the double scattering contributions to the heavy meson differential cross sections by taking into account both initial-state and final-state interactions, and find that these corrections are positive. We further evaluate the nuclear modification factor for muons that come form the semi-leptonic decays of heavy flavor mesons. Phenomenological applications in d+Au collisions at a center-of-mass energy root s = 200 GeV at RHIC and in p+Pb collisions at root s = 5.02 TeV at the LHC are presented. We find that incoherent multiple scattering can describe rather well the observed nuclear enhancement in the intermediate p(T) region for such reactions. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.