D-meson production via sequential hadronization in high-energy nuclear collisions

Abstract

Heavy flavor production serves as an ideal probe of the hadronization mechanism of the quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We study charm-quark hadronization using Langevin transport in the medium together with a sequential coalescence model. Since $D_s$ forms earlier than $D^0$, as obtained from the Dirac equation with an in-medium potential extracted from lattice QCD, the $D_s$ elliptic flow $v_2$ is smaller than the $D^0$ $v_2$ in the intermediate-$p_T$ region, in good agreement with the recent ALICE data. Incorporating sequential coalescence, charm-quark number conservation, and strangeness enhancement predicts a peak in the yield ratio $D_s/D^0$ at low $p_T$, which can be tested in future heavy-ion collisions.

6 pages, 5 figures, version published in PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 136, 232301 (2026)