EPJ Web of Conferences 171, 18006 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201817118006

Measurements of charm hadron production and anisotropic flow in Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV with the STAR experiment at RHIC

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720. USA.

^* e-mail: skradhakrishnan@lbl.gov

Published online: 2 February 2018

Abstract

Heavy flavor quarks, owing to their large masses, are predominantly produced through initial hard parton scatterings in heavy-ion collisions, and thus are excellent probes to study properties of the strongly coupled Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP) medium produced in these collisions. Measurements of anisotropic flow harmonics of heavy flavor hadrons can provide information on the properties of the medium, including the heavy flavor transport coefficient. Charm quark hadronization mechanism in the sQGP medium can be studied through measurements of yields of different charm hadrons. In these proceedings we report on the measurements of elliptic and triangular flow harmonics of D⁰ mesons as well as the yield ratios of D^±_s/D⁰ and Λ^±_c/D⁰ in Au+Au collisions at = 200 GeV at RHIC with the STAR detector. These measurements use the STAR Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) to reconstruct charm hadrons via their hadronic decay channels. Results are compared to model calculations and the implications on the understanding of charm quark dynamics in the medium are discussed.