Heavy-flavor dynamics in relativistic p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{S_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV

TL;DR

This paper models heavy-flavor dynamics in p-Pb collisions at the LHC using viscous hydrodynamics and an improved Langevin approach, revealing how charm quarks evolve and hadronize, affecting D-meson observables.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated framework combining viscous hydrodynamics, Langevin dynamics, and hybrid hadronization to study heavy-flavor in small collision systems.

Findings

Charm quark evolution affects D-meson R_pPb at different momenta.

D-meson v2 is smaller than light hadrons, indicating partial medium coupling.

The model reproduces central R_AA data with a specific diffusion coefficient.

Abstract

We investigate the heavy flavor dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) medium created in p-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the (3+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamics model describing QGP medium, the dynamics of heavy quarks are studied in an improved Langevin framework incorporating both collisional and radiative energy loss. The hadronization of the heavy quarks is given by a hybrid model of fragmentation and recombination. We find that the in-medium evolution of charm quarks raises the D-meson $R_{pPb}$ at low transverse momenta while it suppresses the D-meson $R_{pPb}$ at intermediate momenta. In addition, the elliptic flow of D-meson is calculated. For a diffusion coefficient which reproduces central $R_{AA}$ data at the LHC, we find a much smaller D-meson $v_2$ compared to the light hadrons. This observation indicates an incomplete coupling between heavy quarks with the medium, due to the reduced medium size compared to AA collisions.