Charm Production at RHIC to O(\ALPHA_S^3)

Abstract

We present results on rapidity and transverse momentum distributions of inclusive charm quark production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC, including the next-to-leading order, $O({\alpha }_s^3)$, radiative corrections and the nuclear shadowing effect. We find the effective, nuclear K-factor to be $K(y)\approx 1.4$ for $\mid y\mid \le 3$ in the rapidity distribution, while $1\le K(p_T)\le 3$ for $1GeV\le p_T\le 6GeV$ in the $p_T$ distribution. We incorporate multiple parton scatterings in our calculation of the fraction of all central events that contain at least one charm quark pair. We obtain the effective $A$-dependence of the charm cross sections. Finally, we comment on the possibility of detecting the quark-gluon plasma signal as an enhanced charm production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC.

arXiv commentAZPH-TH/94-13; revised version, new figures, results obtained with new shadowing function; accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

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