Cold Nuclear Matter Effects and Heavy Quark Production in PHENIX

TL;DR

This paper reports measurements of heavy flavor production in various collision systems at RHIC, analyzing cold nuclear matter effects and their implications for understanding heavy ion collision results.

Contribution

It provides new high-luminosity measurements of heavy flavor cross sections in p+p, d+Au, Cu+Cu, and Au+Au collisions at different energies, highlighting cold nuclear matter effects.

Findings

d+Au results indicate significant cold nuclear matter effects on heavy flavor production.

Data suggest modifications to heavy flavor yields due to nuclear environment effects.

Implications for interpreting heavy ion collision results are discussed.

Abstract

The PHENIX experiment uses semileptonic decay channels to measure open and closed heavy flavor cross sections across the rapidity range $-2.2 < y < 2.4$. High luminosity data are now available for p+p, d+Au, Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=200 GeV, and for Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$= 62 GeV. We discuss recent d+Au results for open heavy flavor and $J/\psi$ production, and discuss their implications for the cold nuclear matter contributions to heavy flavor production in heavy ion collisions.