T-matrix approach to heavy quark diffusion in the QGP

TL;DR

This paper develops a T-matrix approach to evaluate heavy quark transport in the Quark-Gluon Plasma, incorporating resonance effects and comparing results with experimental data from RHIC.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative T-matrix method using lattice-QCD potentials to calculate heavy-quark transport coefficients in the QGP.

Findings

Resonance states enhance heavy-quark diffusion coefficients.

Transport coefficients lead to better agreement with RHIC electron spectra.

Heavy quarks exhibit significant elliptic flow in the QGP.

Abstract

We assess transport properties of heavy quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) using static heavy-quark (HQ) potentials from lattice-QCD calculations in a Brueckner many-body T-matrix approach to evaluate elastic heavy-quark-light-quark scattering amplitudes. In the attractive meson and diquark channels resonance states are formed for temperatures up to ~1.5 T_c, increasing pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients for heavy-quark rescattering in the QGP beyond the expectations from perturbative-QCD calculations. We use these transport coefficients, complemented with perturbative elastic HQ gluon scattering, in a relativistic Langevin simulation to obtain HQ p_t distributions and elliptic flow (v_2) under conditions relevant for the hot and dense medium created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The heavy quarks are hadronized to open-charm and -bottom mesons within a combined quark-coalescence fragmentation scheme. The resulting single-electron spectra from their semileptonic decays are confronted with recent data on "non-photonic electrons" in 100 AGeV Au-Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).