Correlations of Heavy Quarks Produced at Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates heavy quark correlations in high-energy collisions, highlighting their sensitivity to medium effects and production mechanisms, and compares initial prompt production with additional charm quark production in heavy ion collisions.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of heavy quark pair correlations in proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, emphasizing medium modifications and different production processes.

Findings

Heavy quark correlations are sensitive to medium effects.

Additional charm production mechanisms alter correlation patterns.

Differences observed between prompt and secondary charm production.

Abstract

We study the correlations of heavy quarks produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions and find them to be quite sensitive to the effects of the medium and the production mechanisms. In order to put this on a quantitative footing, as a first step, we analyze the azimuthal, transverse momentum, and rapidity correlations of heavy quark-anti quark ($Q\overline{Q}$) pairs in $pp$ collisions at $\cal{O}$($\alpha_{s}^{3}$). This sets the stage for the identification and study of medium modification of similar correlations in relativistic collision of heavy nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider. Next we study the additional production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions due to multiple scatterings, {\it viz.}, jet-jet collisions, jet-thermal collisions, and thermal interactions. We find that these give rise to azimuthal correlations which are quite different from those arising from prompt initial production at leading order and at next to leading order.