Thermalization of heavy quarks in the quark-gluon plasma

By H. Hees, R. Rapp. 2004

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Charm- and bottom-quark rescattering in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is investigated with the objective of assessing the approach toward thermalization. Employing a Fokker-Planck equation to approximate the collision integral of the Boltzmann equation we augment earlier studies based on perturbative parton cross sections by introducing resonant heavy-light quark interactions. The latter are motivated by recent QCD lattice calculations that indicate the presence of “hadronic” states in the QGP. We model these states by colorless (pseudo-) scalar and (axial-) vector D and B mesons within a heavy-quark effective theory framework. We find that the presence of these resonances at moderate QGP temperatures substantially accelerates the kinetic equilibration of c quarks as compared to using perturbative interactions. We also comment on consequences for D-meson observables in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cec1098c285c01bcd7b150f390ac889f5459383c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Relativistic Brownian Motion (2008, methodology): “Physically reasonable expressions for α(p) may be deduced from kinetic theory [314, 315, 424, 425, 426, 427] or microscopic Hamiltonian models that take into account the interactions as well as the statistical properties of the heat bath [21, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 428].”
Improved Holographic QCD (2010, background): “Generally the numbers obtained are close to those obtained by [37] and [42].”
Comparing the drag force on heavy quarks in N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory and QCD (2006, background): “If figure 4 of [28] may be taken as representative of relaxation times in this approach, then at T = 250 MeV the relaxation time is roughly 4.”
Momentum fluctuations of heavy quarks in the gauge-string duality (2006, background): “The predictions of [35], which, like [38], are based on a Langevin approach, have a significantly larger momentum range in which RAA is strongly decreasing, and ηD(p) as presented in the closely related work [37] is again slowly decreasing in the range of interest.”
Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton–proton to heavy-ion collisions (2015, methodology): “24An alternative consists in using an effective model for quark-Q scattering via D meson like resonance excitations in the QGP based on heavyquark effective theory (HQET) and chiral symmetry in the light-quark sector [620].”
Thermal transport and drag force in improved holographic QCD (2009, background): “Generally the numbers we obtain are close to those obtained by [17] and [25].”
Extraction of heavy-flavor transport coefficients in QCD matter (2018, methodology): “The deviations from using the explicitly calculated coefficients can serve as a quality check of the approximation [88].”