Towards the determination of heavy-quark transport coefficients in quark-gluon plasma

Understand

Several transport models have been employed in recent years to analyze heavy-flavor meson spectra in high-energy heavy-ion collisions.

• Heavy-quark transport coefficients extracted from these models with their default parameters vary, however, by up to a factor of 5 at high momenta.
• To investigate the origin of this large theoretical uncertainty, a systematic comparison of heavy-quark transport coefficients is carried out between various transport models.
• Within a common scheme devised for the nuclear modification factor of charm quarks in a brick medium of a quark-gluon plasma, the systematic uncertainty of the extracted drag coefficient among these models is shown to be reduced to a factor of 2, which can be viewed as the smallest intrinsic systematical error band achievable at present time.