Charm Production at RHIC
Abstract
Observations by the PHENIX and STAR collaborations suggest that a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma is produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). After a brief introduction to heavy-ion physics, measurements of heavy-quark production in heavy-ion collisions and the modification of heavy-quark spectra by the QGP are presented. Measurements of the total charm cross-section in several different collision systems confirm that charm quark-antiquark pairs are produced through parton hard-scattering in the initial stages of the collisions. Non-photonic electrons (proxies for heavy quarks) are suppressed by about a factor of 5 in central Au + Au collisions relative to p + p collisions. This is larger than most current theoretical predictions and has lead to a re-examination of heavy-quark energy loss in the medium. The relative contributions of c and b decays to the non-photonic electron spectrum have been predicted by perturbative QCD calculations; STAR measurements of azimuthal correlation functions of non-photonic electrons and hadrons agree with these predictions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0710.1051,
title = {Charm Production at RHIC},
author = {A. G. Knospe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.1051},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
To be published in the proceedings of CHARM07, Ithaca, NY, August 2007, eConf C070805. RevTeX v4.0, 11 pages with 12 figures; Version 2: corrected metadata, slight changes in content for clarification, additional references regarding J/psi suppression