2013/05/31 by Marlene Nahrgang, Joerg Aichelin, Pol Bernard Gossiaux +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.89.014905
published as Phys. Rev. C 89, 014905 (2014)
arxiv created 2014/01/05 · arxiv updated 2014/01/29
We investigate how the possible existence of hadronic bound states above the deconfinement transition temperature Tc affects heavy-quark observables like the nuclear modification factor, the elliptic flow and azimuthal correlations. Lattice QCD calculations suggest that above Tc the effective degrees of freedom might not be exclusively partonic but that a certain fraction of hadronic degrees of freedom might already form at higher temperatures. This is an interesting questions by itself but also has a strong influence on other probes of the strongly interacting matter produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. A substantial fraction of hadronic bound states above Tc reduces on average the interaction of the heavy quarks with colored constituents of the medium. We find that all studied observables are highly sensitive to the active degrees of freedom in the quark-gluon plasma.