Heavy-Quark Diffusion in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

The diffusion of heavy quarks through the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) as produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions has long been recognized as an excellent probe of its transport properties. In addition, the experimentally observed heavy-flavor hadrons carry valuable information about the hadronization process of the transported quarks. Here we review recent progress in the theoretical developments of heavy-quark interactions in the QGP and how they relate to the nonperturbative hadronization process, and discuss the recent status of the pertinent phenomenology in heavy-ion collisions at the RHIC and the LHC. The interactions of heavy quarks in the QGP also constitute a central building block in the description of the heavy quarkonia which controls their transport parameters as well. We will thus focus on theoretical approaches that aim for a unified description of open and hidden heavy-flavor particles in medium, and discuss how they can be constrained by lattice QCD "data" and utilized to deduce fundamental properties of the microscopic interactions and emerging spectral properties of the strongly coupled QGP.

Heavy-Flavour Jets in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

“…A lot of theoretical studies have been performed to confront the experimental data obtained in the high-energy heavy-ion collisions, which greatly improve our understanding of the in-medium evolution and hadronization mechanisms [59-61] of heavy quarks (for detailed reviews see [62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70]). Specifically, the current models treat the elastic and inelastic interactions between heavy quarks and the QGP medium with multiple methods, consisting mainly the perturbative or non-perturbative analytic calculations (SCET [41,71], CUJET [46,72], DREENA [73][74][75][76][77][78], WHDG [79,80], AdS/CFT (HG) [81,82]), and the Monte Carlo transport approaches based on the Boltzmann (BAMPS [83][84][85][86], MC@ s HQ [87][88][89], (Q)LBT [47,57], LIDO [49,90], Catania-pQCD/QPM [91][92][93][94]), the Langevin (POWL ANG [45, 95,96], Duke [44,97], UrQMD [98][99][100], TAMU [40,…”

Heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient in 3D gluon plasma

“…The typical momentum exchange of a heavy quark with the QGP is small (O(gT )) and thus a significant change in momentum requires several scatterings with the medium. This is characteristic of diffusive motion, and hence diffusion properties of heavy quarks within the QGP have been subject to extensive research [1][2][3]. The interaction of the heavy quark with the medium is conventionally quantified by the momentum diffusion coefficient κ.…”