Thermal production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions at Future Circular Collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermal production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions at the Future Circular Collider, showing that quark-gluon plasma can significantly produce charm quarks beyond initial nucleon collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a rate equation approach to quantify thermal charm production in an expanding quark-gluon plasma at future collider energies.

Findings

Thermal charm production is comparable to initial hard scattering.

The rate equation method effectively models charm quark yield.

Charm production can be significantly enhanced in quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

By solving the rate equation in an expanding quark-gluon plasma, we study thermal production of charm quarks in central Pb+Pb collisions at the Future Circular Collider. With the charm quark production cross section taken from the perturbative QCD at the next-to-leading order, we find that charm quark production from the quark-gluon plasma can be appreciable compared to that due to initial hard scattering between colliding nucleons.