Heavy Flavor Physics in STAR

Abstract

In relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC, heavy quarks are primarily created from initial hard scatterings. Since their large masses are not easily affected by the strong interaction with QCD medium they may carry information from the system at early stage. The interaction between heavy quarks and the medium is sensitive to the medium dynamics; therefore heavy quarks are suggested as an ideal probe to quantify the properties of the strongly interacting QCD matter. The STAR Collaboration should complete the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) and the Muon Telescope Detector (MTD) upgrades by 2014. These detectors will greatly enhance the STAR physics capability to measure heavy quark collectivity and correlations using topologically reconstructed charmed hadrons and heavy quark decay electron-muon correlations. In addition, measurements of the quarkonium muon decay channels will enable us to separate Upsilon 1S from 2S and 3S states in p + p and A+A collisions. Selected STAR results on open charm and quarkonia production in p + p and Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV are presented. An overview of the upgrades, their expected performance and current status is presented.