Quark coalescence for charmed mesons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We investigate effects of charm-quark interactions in a quark-gluon plasma on the production of D and J/ mesons in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Employing a previously constructed coalescence model that successfully reproduces the transverse momentum (pT) spectra and elliptic flow (v2(pT)) of light hadrons at RHIC from underlying light-quark distributions at the phase transition temperature Tc, D-meson and J/ pT-spectra are evaluated. For the charm-quark distributions, we consider two limiting scenarios: (i) no rescattering, corresponding to perturbative QCD (pQCD) spectra and (ii) complete thermalization including transverse expansion. We find that D-mesons acquire a minimal v2 inherited from their light-quark content and corresponding semileptonic decay spectra of single electrons practically preserve the v2 of the parent particles, exhibiting marked differences between the pQCD and thermal scenarios for pT1 GeV. Likewise, the pT-spectra and yields of J/'s differ appreciably in the two scenarios. 2004 Elsevier B.V.

published proceedings

  • Physics Letters B

author list (cited authors)

  • Greco, V., Ko, C. M., & Rapp, R.

citation count

  • 251

complete list of authors

  • Greco, V||Ko, CM||Rapp, R

publication date

  • January 2004