Propagation of heavy baryons in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the hadronic phase influences heavy baryon observables like suppression and flow in heavy-ion collisions, using Langevin dynamics and fragmentation functions to simulate their evolution at RHIC and LHC energies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the hadronic phase's impact on heavy baryon observables, highlighting the significance of hadronic rescattering on elliptic flow and suppression factors.

Findings

Strong suppression of $\\Lambda_c$ and $\ ext{\Lambda}_b$ observed.

Hadronic medium significantly affects elliptic flow but not nuclear suppression.

The $\\Lambda_c/D$ ratio remains unaffected by the hadronic phase rescattering.

Abstract

The drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy baryons ($\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$) in the hadronic phase created in the latter stage of the heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies have been evaluated recently. In this work we compute some experimental observables, such as the nuclear suppression factor $R_{AA}$ and the elliptic flow $v_2$ of heavy baryons at RHIC and LHC energies, highlighting the role of the hadronic phase contribution to these observables, which are going to be measured at Run 3 of LHC. For the time evolution of the heavy quarks in the QGP and heavy baryons in the hadronic phase we use the Langevin dynamics. For the hadronization of the heavy quarks to heavy baryons we employ Peterson fragmentation functions. We observe a strong suppression of both the $\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$. We find that the hadronic medium has a sizable impact on the heavy-baryon elliptic flow whereas the impact of hadronic medium rescattering is almost unnoticeable on the nuclear suppression factor. We evaluate the $\Lambda_c/D$ ratio at RHIC and LHC. We find that $\Lambda_c/D$ ratio remain unaffected due to the hadronic phase rescattering which enable it as a nobel probe of QGP phase dynamics along with its hadronization.