Single electron yields from semileptonic charm and bottom hadron decays in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV

Understand

The PHENIX Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has measured open heavy-flavor production in minimum bias Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV via the yields of electrons from semileptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons.

• Previous heavy-flavor electron measurements indicated substantial modification in the momentum distribution of the parent heavy quarks due to the quark-gluon plasma created in these collisions.
• For the first time, using the PHENIX silicon vertex detector to measure precision displaced tracking, the relative contributions from charm and bottom hadrons to these electrons as a function of transverse momentum are measured in Au$+$Au collisions.
• We compare the fraction of electrons from bottom hadrons to previously published results extracted from electron-hadron correlations in $p$$+$$p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV and find the fractions to be similar within the large uncertainties on both measurements for $p_T>4$ GeV/$c$.