Diffusion and fluctuations of open charmed hadrons in an interacting hadronic medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interactions in a hadronic medium influence the diffusion and fluctuations of open charmed hadrons, providing insights into the medium's properties and the onset of deconfinement in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It introduces an extended van der Waals hadron resonance gas model to study the effects of attractive and repulsive interactions on charmed hadron transport and fluctuations.

Findings

Interactions significantly affect diffusion coefficients.

Fluctuations can signal deconfinement onset.

The model highlights the role of hadronic interactions in medium properties.

Abstract

Heavy quarks are excellent probes to understand the hot and dense medium formed in ultra-relativistic collisions. In a hadronic medium, studying the transport properties, e.g. the drag ($\gamma$), momentum diffusion ($B_{0}$), and spatial diffusion ($D_{s}$) coefficients of open charmed hadrons can provide useful information about the medium. Moreover, the fluctuations of charmed hadrons can help us to locate the onset of their deconfinement. In this work, we incorporate attractive and repulsive interactions in the well-established van der Waals hadron resonance gas model (VDWHRG) and study the diffusion and fluctuations of charmed hadrons. This study helps us understand the importance of interactions in the system, which affect both the diffusion and fluctuations of charmed hadrons.