Light Cone wavefunction approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in the QGP

Abstract

We elucidate the role of time scales that determine heavy quark dynamics in the QGP. Quark-antiquark potentials extracted from the lattice are used to demonstrate the existence of open heavy flavor bound-state solutions in the vicinity of the critical temperature, and their light cone wavefunctions are obtained. We use these wavefunctions to calculate the in-medium modification of the heavy quark distribution and decay probabilities. For the case of high transverse momentum D or B mesons traversing the QGP, we combine the new meson formation and dissociation mechanism with the traditional parton-level charm and beauty quark quenching to obtain predictions for the heavy meson and non-photonic electron suppression in Cu+Cu and Pb+Pb collisions at RHIC and the LHC, respectively.

4 pages, 3 figures - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee. v2, small embellishments in the figures

References in corpus (11)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Energy Loss and Flow of Heavy Quarks in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Erratum: Transverse momentum and centrality dependence of high-\pt\ non-photonic electron suppression in Au+Au collisions at \sqrtsNN\ = 200 GeV
• A light-cone wavefunction approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in QCD matter
• Can quarkonia survive deconfinement ?
• Collisional dissociation of heavy mesons in dense QCD matter
• Heavy quark jet quenching with collisional plus radiative energy loss and path length fluctuations
• A systematic study of direct photon production in heavy ion collisions
• Open charm tomography of cold nuclear matter
• On dissociation of heavy mesons in a hot quark-gluon plasma
• Non-photonic electron-hadron correlations at STAR