Heavy-Quark Diffusion, Flow and Recombination at RHIC

Abstract

We discuss recent developments in assessing heavy-quark interaction in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). While induced gluon radiation is expected to be the main energy-loss mechanism for fast-moving quarks, we focus on elastic scattering which prevails toward lower energies, evaluating both perturbative (gluon-exchange) and nonperturbative (resonance formation) interactions in the QGP. The latter are treated within an effective model for D- and B-meson resonances above T_c as motivated by current QCD lattice calculations. Pertinent diffusion and drag constants, following from a Fokker-Planck equation, are implemented into an expanding fireball model for Au-Au collisions at RHIC using relativistic Langevin simulations. Heavy quarks are hadronized in a combined fragmentation and coalescence framework, and resulting electron-decay spectra are compared to recent RHIC data. A reasonable description of both nuclear suppression factors and elliptic flow up to momenta of ~5 GeV supports the notion of a strongly interacting QGP created at RHIC. Consequences and further tests of the proposed resonance interactions are discussed.

8 pages, 14 figures, contribution to the proceedings for the "International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter 2006"

References in corpus (1)

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

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Heavy-Quark Kinetics in the QGP at LHC
• Thermal Dileptons at LHC
• Energy gain of heavy quarks by fluctuations in the QGP
• Charm hadron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions within a quark combination model
• Overview of charm production at RHIC
• SQM 2006: Theory Summary and Perspectives
• Future Experiments in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions