HIC for FAIR Kernphysikalisches Kolloquium

Location: Institute of Theoretical Physics, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, Serminar Room PHYS 2.116
Time: Thursday, November 28, 2013, 2:30-3:30pm (plus 10min for discussion)
Contact: hees@fias.uni-frankfurt.de

Recently, we have proposed a microscopic approach for the quenching and thermalisation of heavy quarks (HQ) in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions (URHIC) [1, 2, 3, 4], assuming that they interact with light partons through both elastic and radiative processes evaluated by resorting to some parameterization of the running coupling constant, while those partons are spatially distributed along the hydrodynamical evolution of the hot medium. This approach is able to explain successfully several observables measured at RHIC and LHC, such as the nuclear modification factor and the elliptic flow of open heavy flavor mesons and non-photonic single electrons. The diffusion coefficient of heavy quarks in the quark gluon plasma – a fundamental property of this state of matter – can thus be extracted and compared with recent lattice calculations. In this contribution, we provide a general overview of our MC@HQ event generator which can presently be coupled to the hydrodynamical evolution of the plasma as realized by the Kolb-Heinz approach or by the EPOS model. We discuss the influence of the different hydrodynamical evolutions on the predictions for heavy mesons. We confront the results of our model for D and B mesons as well as for the lepton production in URHIC with experimental results obtained so far by the various collaborations at RHIC and LHC. Perspectives for future observables like correlations will be proposed.

Nuclear Physics Colloquium

Heavy quark quenching and elliptic flow from RHIC to LHC: can the experiments be understood by pQCD?

J. Aichelin (SUBATECH, Nantes, France)