Five things you should remember about heavy flavor measurements

Abstract

Heavy quarks are important tools to study the properties of the hot and dense nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions. They are produced very early, in the initial interactions with large momentum transfer, and are expected to interact differently from light quarks with the nuclear medium. Measurements of heavy flavor production can provide insights into transport and thermodynamics properties of the created system. In this paper, I give as a brief introduction to the experimental studies of heavy flavor production in relativistic heavy ion collisions and discuss related challenges.