Diffusion of heavy quarks in the early stage of high-energy nuclear collisions at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

2019/11/30 by Jun-Hong Liu, J. H. Liu, Salvatore Plumari +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Charm (quantum number) #Gluon #Hadron #Heavy ion #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ion #Large Hadron Collider #Nuclear matter #Nuclear physics #Nucleon #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quark #Quark–gluon plasma #Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.102.044902

published as Phys. Rev. C 102, 044902 (2020) · 12 pages, 8+1 figures. Discussion on the scaling of parameters from three to two colors added in Appendix. Matches published version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1805.09617

openalex publication_date 2020/10/07 · arxiv created 2020/10/09 · arxiv updated 2020/10/13 · openalex created_date 2020/10/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We study the diffusion of charm and beauty in the early stage of high-energy nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies, considering the interaction of these heavy quarks with the evolving Glasma by means of the Wong equations, in the color-SU(2) case. In comparison with previous works, we add the longitudinal expansion of the gluon medium as well as we estimate the diffusion coefficient in momentum space, and the effect of energy loss due to gluon radiation. We find that heavy quarks diffuse in the strong transverse color fields in the very early stage (0.2--0.3 fm/c) and this leads to a suppression at low p_T and enhancement at intermediate low p_T. The shape of the observed nuclear suppression factor obtained within our calculations is in qualitative agreement with the experimental results of the same quantity for D mesons in proton-nucleus collisions. We compute the nuclear suppression factor in nucleus-nucleus collisions as well, for both charm and beauty, finding a substantial impact of the evolving Glasma phase on these, suggesting that initialization of heavy quarks spectra in the quark-gluon plasma phase should not neglect the early evolution in the strong gluon fields.

Citations

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