Heavy flavours in high-energy nuclear collisions: quenching, flow and correlations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of heavy flavor particles in high-energy nuclear collisions, focusing on quenching, flow, and correlations, using an extended POWLANG model that includes medium-influenced hadronization, resulting in improved agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

The study extends the POWLANG transport model to incorporate medium-modified hadronization, enhancing the understanding of heavy quark dynamics in Quark-Gluon Plasma.

Findings

Flow of light quarks significantly impacts D meson R_AA and v_2.

Model extension improves agreement with experimental measurements.

Medium effects are crucial for accurate heavy flavor particle modeling.

Abstract

We present results for the quenching, elliptic flow and azimuthal correlations of heavy flavour particles in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions obtained through the POWLANG transport setup, developed in the past to study the propagation of heavy quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma and here extended to include a modeling of their hadronization in the presence of a medium. Hadronization is described as occurring via the fragmentation of strings with endpoints given by the heavy (anti-)quark Q(Qbar) and a thermal parton $qbar(q)$ from the medium. The flow of the light quarks is shown to affect significantly the R_AA} and v_2 of the final D mesons, leading to a better agreement with the experimental data.