A light-cone wavefunction approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in QCD matter

TL;DR

This paper develops a light-cone wavefunction approach to study open heavy flavor dynamics in QCD matter, calculating parton distributions, fragmentation functions, and in-medium modifications, with applications to heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a novel light-cone wavefunction framework for heavy flavor in QCD matter, incorporating lattice potentials and in-medium effects for the first time.

Findings

Heavy quark bound states exist near the QGP critical temperature.

In-medium modifications significantly affect heavy meson production.

Predictions match observed suppression patterns in heavy-ion collisions.

Abstract

We calculate the lowest order charm and beauty parton distribution functions in and fragmentation functions into D and B mesons using the operator definitions of factorized perturbative QCD. In the vacuum, we find the leading corrections that arise from the structure of the final-state hadrons. Quark-antiquark potentials extracted from the lattice are employed to demonstrate the existence of open heavy flavor bound-state solutions in the QGP in the vicinity of the critical temperature. We provide first results for the in-medium modification of the heavy quark distribution and decay probabilities in a co-moving plasma. In an improved perturbative QCD description of heavy flavor dynamics in the thermal medium, we combine D and B meson formation and dissociation with parton-level charm and beauty quark quenching to obtain predictions for the heavy meson and non-photonic electron suppression in Cu+Cu and Pb+Pb collisions at RHIC and the LHC, respectively.