Heavy-flavor observables at RHIC and LHC

TL;DR

This paper studies charm-quark behavior in quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC, showing how collisional and radiative processes affect D-meson spectra and flow, and proposing new measurements of triangular flow.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of charm-quark propagation, including the prediction of nonzero triangular flow, and compares results across different collision energies.

Findings

Significant suppression of D-meson spectra at high transverse momentum.

Finite elliptic flow of heavy quarks in the medium.

Nonzero triangular flow of D mesons in non-central collisions.

Abstract

We investigate the charm-quark propagation in the QGP media produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC. Purely collisional and radiative processes lead to a significant suppression of final $D$-meson spectra at high transverse momentum and a finite flow of heavy quarks inside the fluid dynamical evolution of the light partons. The $D$-meson nuclear modification factor and the elliptic flow are studied at two collision energies. We further propose to measure the triangular flow of $D$ mesons, which we find to be nonzero in non-central collisions.