Heavy quark potential and thermal charm production in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper compares three heavy quark potentials in QGP to experimental charm production data from LHC, finding the unscreened potential aligns best with observations, thus informing models of quark interactions in hot nuclear matter.

Contribution

It evaluates the effectiveness of different heavy quark potentials in predicting thermal charm production in heavy-ion collisions, highlighting the unscreened potential's superior performance.

Findings

Free energy potential overestimates charm production.

Unscreened potential aligns closely with experimental data.

Results inform better modeling of quark interactions in QGP.

Abstract

Heavy quark mass in QGP is related to the heavy quark potential at a large distance. In this study we test three different heavy quark potentials, namely, the free energy, the internal energy of the heavy quark pair in QGP, and the unscreened potential, which was recently proposed by the HotQCD Collaboration, through the thermal production of charm quarks in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. We find that the free energy potential overestimates charm production in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, while the unscreened potential produces results closest to the experimental data from the ALICE Collaboration among the three potentials.