An experimental review of open heavy flavor and quarkonium production at RHIC
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An experimental review of open heavy flavor and quarkonium production at RHIC Ze-Bo Tang1,2
•
Wang-Mei Zha1,2 • Yi-Fei Zhang1,2
Received: 22 March 2020 / Revised: 28 May 2020 / Accepted: 29 May 2020 / Published online: 4 August 2020 Ó China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (Science Press), Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Nuclear Society and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract Open heavy flavors and quarkonia are unique probes of the hot–dense medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. Their production in p þ p collisions also constitutes an important test of QCD. In this paper, we review selected results on the open heavy flavors and quarkonia generated in the p þ p and heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The physical implications are also discussed. Keywords Heavy flavor Heavy quark Quarkonium Quark–gluon plasma Heavy-ion collisions QCD
1 Introduction In ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the impact of two colliding nuclei creates an extremely hot and dense medium, in which quarks and gluons are liberated from confinement inside hadrons and form a new state of matter, referred to as quark–gluon plasma (QGP) [1, 2]. In the past 20 years, extensive experimental evidence from the
This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2018YFE0104900 and 2018YFE0205200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11675168, 11890712 and 11720101001) & Yi-Fei Zhang [email protected] 1
State Key Laboratory of Particle Detection and Electronics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
2
Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including the jet quenching and strong particle flow of light-flavor hadrons (consisting of the light quarks u, d and s), has shown that the QGP matter is strongly coupled and behaves like a liquid with a small viscosity-to-entropy-density ratio [3–6]. However, most of the light-flavor hadrons are produced late in the collision process, along with final state effects; thus, information about the QGP created during early stages of the collision may be smeared. Heavy-quark masses (mc 1:3 GeV=c2 , mb 4:8 GeV=c2 ) are much larger than those of light quarks and exceed the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) energy scale (KQCD ). They are predominately produced via initial hard processes during the early stages of ultra-relativistic heavyion collisions; here, the probability of thermal production is negligible, especially at RHIC energies. Thus, heavy quarks experience the whole evolution of the QCD matter created in heavy-ion collisions, making them ideal probes to study QGP matter properties. Most of the heavy quarks hadronize into open heavy flavor mesons (e.g., D0 , D , D s , 0 B , B , and Bs ) and baryons (e.g., Kc ); however, a small fraction (\1% of the total heavy quarks) form hidden heavy flavor quark
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