Thermal and non-thermal charmed meson production in heavy ions collisions at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper analyzes LHC data on charmed meson production in heavy ion collisions, showing that a two-component model can reproduce the observed spectra and flow, with D-mesons in equilibrium and J/psi not.

Contribution

It introduces a combined thermal and non-thermal modeling approach to charmed meson production in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies.

Findings

D-mesons are largely in kinetic equilibrium with the medium

J/psi mesons are not in kinetic equilibrium

The two-component HYDJET++ model successfully reproduces the data

Abstract

The phenomenological analysis of the LHC data on transverse momentum spectrum and elliptic flow of $J/\psi$ and D mesons in PbPb collisions at center-of-mass energy 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair is presented. The charmed meson production pattern in PbPb collisions may be reproduced by two-component model HYDJET++ including thermal and non-thermal components. The significant part of D-mesons is found to be in a kinetic equilibrium with the created medium, while $J/\psi$-mesons are not.