Thermalization and flow of heavy quarks in the quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

Elastic scattering of charm (c) and bottom (b) quarks via D- and B-meson resonance states in an expanding, strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma is investigated. Drag and diffusion coefficients are calculated from an effective model based on chiral symmetry and heavy-quark effective theory, and utilized in a relativistic Langevin simulation to obtain transverse-momentum spectra and elliptic flow (ν2) of c- and b-quarks. The hadronization to D- and B-mesons is described by coalescence and fragmentation, and the resulting decay-electron spectra are compared to recent RHIC data. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.