Heavy Quark Production from Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates heavy quark production in relativistic heavy ion collisions, analyzing contributions from initial fusion, pre-thermal interactions, and thermalized quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC energies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model including pre-thermal and thermal contributions to heavy quark production, highlighting the significance of pre-thermal processes at LHC energies.

Findings

Pre-thermal charm production is comparable to prompt production at LHC.

Pre-thermal processes impact nuclear modification factor R_AA.

Results suggest implications for heavy quark correlations and dilepton production.

Abstract

We study the production of heavy quarks, charm at BNL-RHIC ($\sqrt{s}$=200 GeV/nucleon) and CERN-LHC ($\sqrt{s}$=5.5 TeV/nucleon) and bottom at CERN-LHC from heavy ions colliding at relativistic energies. We consider initial fusion of gluons (and quark- anti-quark annihilation), pre-thermal parton interactions and interactions in thermalized quark gluon plasma. We also consider free-streaming partons as another extreme and compare the results with those from a thermalized plasma of partons. The pre-thermal contribution is calculated by considering interaction among partons having large transverse momenta (jet-partons) after the initial interaction, and from passage of these partons through a thermalized quark gluon plasma. Charm production from pre-thermal processes is found to be comparable to that from prompt (initial) interactions at LHC. It is suggested that this may have important implications for the study of nuclear modification factor, R$_{\rm {AA}}$ as well as for back-to-back correlation of heavy quarks and production of dileptons having a large mass.