Open charm phenomenology with a multi-stage approach to relativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive multi-stage model for studying open charm production and flow in heavy-ion collisions, integrating hydrodynamics, initial state fluctuations, and Langevin dynamics to analyze charm observables at LHC energies.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed multi-stage approach combining hydrodynamics and Langevin dynamics with initial state fluctuations to better understand charm quark behavior in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Elliptic flow of open charm strongly depends on initial state fluctuations.

Nuclear suppression factor and elliptic flow of D-mesons are effective probes of QGP properties.

Model reproduces key charm observables, highlighting the importance of initial conditions and medium interactions.

Abstract

We study open charm flavor observables in Pb+Pb collision at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}= 2.76$ TeV within the MARTINI framework. The space-time expansion of the quark-gluon plasma is described using the hydrodynamical approach-MUSIC with IP-Glasma initial conditions. The model parameters, including the viscous coefficients, were obtained from a recent Bayesian model-to-data comparison. We evolve heavy quarks in this background using Langevin dynamics while incorporating their collisional and radiative processes in the medium. The sensitivity of charm observables to the IP-Glasma initial state, bulk evolution, and centrality of the collision is studied. We find that the elliptic flow of open charm flavor has a strong dependence on the fluctuating initial conditions in addition to the strength of the interaction of heavy quarks with the medium constituents. Within this framework, the nuclear suppression factor and elliptic flow of D-mesons act as efficient probes to study the initial stages of heavy-ion collisions, transport coefficients associated with QGP medium as well as heavy quark interactions.