Tomography of the Quark-Gluon-Plasma by Charm Quarks

Understand

We study charm production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions by using the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach.

• The initial charm quarks are produced by the Pythia event generator tuned to fit the transverse momentum spectrum and rapidity distribution of charm quarks from Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm (FONLL) calculations.
• The produced charm quarks scatter in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) with the off-shell partons whose masses and widths are given by the Dynamical Quasi-Particle Model (DQPM) which reproduces the lattice QCD equation-of-state in thermal equilibrium.
• The relevant cross section are calculated in a consistent way by employing the effective propagators and couplings from the DQPM.