Light Cone wavefunction approach to open heavy flavor dynamics in the QGP

TL;DR

This paper develops a light cone wavefunction approach to study open heavy flavor dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma, incorporating bound-state solutions and in-medium modifications to predict heavy meson suppression in heavy-ion collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel light cone wavefunction method using lattice-derived potentials to analyze heavy flavor bound states near the critical temperature in the QGP.

Findings

Bound-state solutions exist near the critical temperature.

Calculated in-medium modifications of heavy quark distributions.

Predicted suppression patterns for heavy mesons in RHIC and LHC collisions.

Abstract

We elucidate the role of time scales that determine heavy quark dynamics in the QGP. Quark-antiquark potentials extracted from the lattice are used to demonstrate the existence of open heavy flavor bound-state solutions in the vicinity of the critical temperature, and their light cone wavefunctions are obtained. We use these wavefunctions to calculate the in-medium modification of the heavy quark distribution and decay probabilities. For the case of high transverse momentum D or B mesons traversing the QGP, we combine the new meson formation and dissociation mechanism with the traditional 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.