Effect of three-body elastic scattering on heavy quark momentum degradation in the quark-gluon plasma

Heavy quark drag coefficients in the quark-gluon plasma are evaluated in the perturbative QCD. It is found that for charm quarks the contribution from three-body elastic scattering is comparable to those from two-body elastic and radiative scatterings while for bottom quarks it becomes dominant. Using a schematic expanding fireball model, effects of both two-body and three-body scatterings on the transverse momentum spectra of heavy quarks produced in Au+Au collisions at center of mass energy $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV are studied. Results on electrons from resulting heavy meson decays are compared with available experimental data.