Thermal Charm Production in Quark-Gluon Plasma at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how charm quark production in quark-gluon plasma at LHC energies can be significantly increased due to high temperatures, using next-to-leading order QCD calculations within a simplified hydrodynamic model.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD analysis of thermal charm production in a hydrodynamic model of quark-gluon plasma at LHC energies.

Findings

Charm production could be significantly enhanced at LHC.

Results are sensitive to initial conditions and charm quark mass.

High temperature in quark-gluon plasma boosts charm yields.

Abstract

Charm production from the quark-gluon plasma created in the midrapidity of central heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studied in the next-to-leading order in QCD. Using a schematic longitudinally boost-invariant and transversally expanding fire-cylinder model, we find that charm production could be appreciably enhanced at LHC as a result of the high temperature that is expected to be reached in the produced quark-gluon plasma. Sensitivities of our results to the number of charm quark pairs produced from initial hard scattering, the initial thermalization time and temperature of the quark-gluon plasma, and the charm quark mass are also studied.