Heavy mesons in a hadronic medium: interaction and transport coefficients

TL;DR

This paper reviews the calculation of transport coefficients for heavy mesons in a hot hadronic medium, using effective field theories and unitarity to derive cross sections and analyze their diffusion and drag properties.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining chiral and heavy-quark symmetries with unitarity to accurately compute heavy meson transport coefficients in a thermal medium.

Findings

Transport coefficients are derived from resonant cross sections.

Heavy mesons exhibit significant diffusion and drag in hadronic matter.

The approach provides realistic estimates for heavy meson behavior in dense environments.

Abstract

We review the recent results of heavy meson diffusion in thermal hadronic matter. The interactions of D and B-bar mesons with other hadrons (light mesons and baryons) are extracted from effective field theories based on chiral and heavy-quark symmetries. When these guiding principles are combined with exact unitarity, physical values of the cross sections are obtained. These cross sections (which contain resonant contributions) are used to calculate the drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy mesons immersed in a thermal and dense medium. The transport coefficients are computed using a Fokker-Planck reduction of the Boltzmann equation.