Hadronization of heavy quarks
Jiaxing Zhao, J. Aichelin, Pol-Bernard Gossiaux, Andrea Beraudo, Shanshan Cao, Wenkai Fan, M. He, Vincenzo Minissale, Taesoo Song, Ivan Vitev, Ralf Rapp, Steffen A. Bass, Elena Bratkovskaya, Vincenzo Greco, Salvatore Plumari
Abstract
Heavy-flavor hadrons produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions are a sensitive probe for studying hadronization mechanisms of the quark-gluon-plasma. In this paper, we survey how different transport models for the simulation of heavy-quark diffusion through a quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions implement hadronization and how this affects final state observables. Utilizing the same input charm-quark distribution in all models at the hadronization transition, we find that the transverse-momentum dependence of the nuclear modification factor of various charm hadron species has significant sensitivity to the hadronization scheme. In addition, the charm-hadron elliptic flow exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the elliptic flow of the hadronizing partonic medium. Published by the American Physical Society 2024