Charm-strange meson production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the CERN-LHC energies

TL;DR

This study investigates charm-strange meson production in heavy-ion collisions at CERN-LHC energies, analyzing nuclear modification factors and elliptic flow to understand charm quark interactions with the quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It introduces two models for charm quark diffusion coefficients based on lattice QCD, comparing their effectiveness in describing experimental data on D_s mesons.

Findings

Model-A better describes R_AA(p_T) data.

Model-B better describes v_2(p_T) data.

Heavy-light coalescence enhances D_s production at intermediate p_T.

Abstract

The nuclear modification factor ${R}_{\rm AA}$ and the elliptic flow coefficient ${v}_{\rm 2}$ of charm-strange meson $D^{+}_{s}$ is systematically studied in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02~{\rm TeV}$ and $2.76~{\rm TeV}$. During the modeling, the coupling strength between the injected charm quark and the incident medium constituents, is extracted from the lattice QCD calculations: $2\pi TD_{s}=7$ (\textbf{Model-A}) and $2\pi TD_{s}=1.3 + (T/T_{c})^2$ (\textbf{Model-B}). We find that, comparing ${R}_{\rm AA}(D^{+}_{s})$ with ${R}_{\rm AA}(non-strange)$, the heavy-light coalescence effect is more pronounced for the former one, resulting in an enhancement behavior in the range $2\lesssim {p}_{\rm T}\lesssim5~{\rm GeV}$. The predictions of ${R}_{\rm AA}(D^{+}_{s})$ and ${R}_{\rm AA}(non-strange)$ favor Model-A to have a better description of the measured ${p}_{\rm T}$ dependence in both energies, while their ${v}_{\rm 2}$ prefer Model-B at moderate ${p}_{\rm T}$ ($2\lesssim {p}_{\rm T}\lesssim4~{\rm GeV}$). Therefore, it is necessary to consider the temperature- and/or momentum-dependence of $2\pi TD_{s}$ to describe simultaneously ${R}_{\rm AA}(D^{+}_{s})$ and ${v}_{\rm 2}(D^{+}_{s})$ in different centrality classes in Pb--Pb collisions.