Recent progress on in-medium properties of heavy mesons from finite-temperature EFTs

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding how heavy mesons' properties change in hot QCD matter using finite-temperature effective field theories, with implications for heavy-ion collision experiments.

Contribution

It extends unitarized scattering amplitude calculations to finite temperature and computes thermal spectral functions and transport coefficients for heavy mesons.

Findings

Thermal spectral functions for heavy mesons are obtained using an extended imaginary-time formalism.

Transport coefficients for charm and bottom mesons are calculated within a consistent off-shell kinetic theory.

Results provide insights into heavy-flavor dynamics in hot QCD media, relevant for experimental observations.

Abstract

Mesons with heavy flavor content are an exceptional probe of the hot QCD medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. In the past few years, significant progress has been made toward describing the modification of the properties of heavy mesons in the hadronic phase at finite temperature. Ground-state and excited-state thermal spectral properties can be computed within a self-consistent many-body approach that employs appropriate hadron-hadron effective interactions, providing a unique opportunity to confront hadronic Effective Field Theory predictions with recent and forthcoming lattice QCD simulations and experimental data. In this article, we revisit the application of the imaginary-time formalism to extend the calculation of unitarized scattering amplitudes from the vacuum to finite temperature. These methods allow us to obtain the ground-state thermal spectral functions. The thermal properties of the excited states that are dynamically generated within the molecular picture are also directly accessible. We present here the results of this approach for the open-charm and open-bottom sectors. We also analyze how the heavy-flavor transport properties, which are strongly correlated to experimental observables in heavy-ion collisions, are modified in hot matter. In particular, transport coefficients can be computed using an off-shell kinetic theory that is fully consistent with the effective theory describing the scattering processes. The results of this procedure for both charm and bottom transport coefficients are briefly discussed.