Heavy quark correlations and the effective volume for quarkonia production
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2016 American Physical Society. Using the Boltzmann transport approach, we study the effect of initial spatial and momentum correlations between a heavy quark pair, such as that produced from a p+p collision, on their collision rate in a partonic medium, which is relevant for their thermalization and the production of quarkonium from regeneration. Characterizing this effect by an effective volume given by the inverse of the ratio of their collision rate to the collision rate of a thermally equilibrated and spatially uniformly distributed heavy quark pair in a unit volume, we find that the effective volume is finite and depends sensitively on the momentum of the heavy quark and the temperature of the medium. Generally, it increases linearly with time t at the very beginning, thus an enhanced collision rate, and the increase then becomes slower due to multiple scattering, and finally it increases as t3/2. We further find that the momentum distribution of the colliding heavy quark pair approaches a thermal distribution after about 5 fm/c with an effective temperature similar to that of the medium even though their transverse momentum spectra initially have a -like distribution.