Hadronization of Heavy Quarks

TL;DR

This paper compares different transport models for heavy-quark hadronization in quark-gluon plasma, showing how hadronization schemes influence observable particle distributions in heavy-ion collisions.

Contribution

It provides a systematic survey of hadronization implementations across models and analyzes their impact on heavy-flavor observables using a common charm-quark input.

Findings

Transverse-momentum dependence of nuclear modification factor varies with hadronization scheme.

Charm-hadron elliptic flow depends nontrivially on the medium's flow.

Hadronization scheme significantly influences final-state heavy-flavor observables.

Abstract

Heavy-flavor hadrons produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions are a sensitive probe for studying hadronization mechanisms of the quark-gluon-plasma. In this work, we survey how different transport models for the simulation of heavy-quark diffusion through a quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions implement hadronization and how this affects final-state observables. Utilizing the same input charm-quark distribution in all models at the hadronization transition, we find that the transverse-momentum dependence of the nuclear modification factor of various charm hadron species has significant sensitivity to the hadronization scheme. In addition, the charm-hadron elliptic flow exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the elliptic flow of the hadronizing partonic medium.