https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201612900030
Medium effects on heavy-flavour observables in high-energy nuclear collisions
INFN - Sezione di Torino, Via Pietro Giuria 1, I-10125 Torino
* e-mail: beraudo@to.infn.it
Published online: 25 November 2016
The peculiar role of heavy-flavour observables in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is discussed. Produced in the early stage, c and b quarks cross the hot medium arising from the collision, interacting strongly with the latter, until they hadronize. Depending on the strength of the interaction heavy quarks may or not approach kinetic equilibrium with the plasma, tending in the first case to follow the collective flow of the expanding fireball. The presence of a hot deconfined medium may also affect heavyquark hadronization, being possible for them to recombine with the surrounding light thermal partons, so that the final heavy-flavour hadrons inherit part of the flow of the medium. Here we show how it is possible to develop a complete transport setup allowing one to describe heavy-flavour production in high-energy nuclear collisions, displaying some major results one can obtain. Finally, the possibility that the formation of a hot deconfined medium even in small systems (high-multiplicity p-Au and d-Au collisions, so far) may affect also heavy-flavour observables is investigated.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2016
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
