English

Does the Charm Flow at RHIC?

Nuclear Theory 2009-10-09 v1

Abstract

Recent PHENIX Au+Au -> e- + X data from open charm decay are shown to be consistent with two extreme opposite dynamical scenarios of ultra-relativistic nuclear reactions. Perturbative QCD without final state interactions was previously shown to be consistent with the data. However, we show that the data are also consistent with zero mean free path hydrodynamics characterized by a common transverse flow velocity field. The surprising coincidence of both D and B hydrodynamic flow spectra with pQCD up to p_T ~ 3 and 5 GeV, respectively, suggests that heavy quarks may be produced essentially at rest in the rapidly expanding gluon plasma. Possible implications and further tests of collective heavy quark dynamics are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.nucl-th/0212068,
  title  = {Does the Charm Flow at RHIC?},
  author = {S. Batsouli and S. Kelly and M. Gyulassy and J. L. Nagle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:nucl-th/0212068},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Lett. B