  The quenching of light and heavy flavor hadrons in relativistic heavy-ion
collisions probes the color and flavor dependences of parton energy loss
through a color-deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP), and thus reveals the
properties of QCD matter at extremely high density and temperature. By
combining a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculation of parton
production, a general ansatz of parton energy loss functions and parton
fragmentation functions, we calculate the nuclear modification of various
hadron species -- charged hadrons, $D$ mesons and $B$-decayed $J/\psi$ -- over
a wide transverse momentum regime. Comparing our calculations to the
experimental data using the Bayesian statistical analysis, we perform a first
simultaneous extraction of the energy loss functions of gluons ($g$), light
quarks ($q$), charm quarks ($c$) and bottom quarks ($b$) inside the QGP. We
find that the average parton energy loss at high energies follows the expected
hierarchy of $\langle \Delta E_g \rangle > \langle \Delta E_q \rangle \sim
\langle \Delta E_c \rangle > \langle \Delta E_b \rangle$, while the parton
energy loss distribution can further test the QCD calculations of parton
interaction with the dense nuclear matter. We also find that the reduction of
experimental uncertainties can significantly improve the precision of the
extracted parton energy loss functions inside the QGP.
