Jet-like correlations of heavy-flavor particles – from RHIC to LHC

Abstract

Measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory have revealed strong modification of the jet structure in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, which can be attributed to the interaction of hard scattered partons with the hot and dense QCD matter. The study of heavy-quark (charm and bottom) production in such collisions provides key tests of parton energy-loss models and, thus, yields profound insight into the properties of the produced matter. The high-pT yield of heavy-flavor decay electrons exhibits an unexpected large suppression. Since those single electrons have contributions from charm and bottom decays an experimental method is needed to investigate them separately. Heavy-flavor particle correlations provide information about the underlying production mechanism. In this contribution, a review on recent measurements on azimuthal correlations of single electrons and open charmed mesons at RHIC and perspectives of such measurements at the CERN-Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented. Moreover, it has been shown that next-to-leading-order (NLO) QCD processes, such as gluon splitting, become important at LHC energies. It will be demonstrated how this contribution can be determined through the measurement of the charm content in jets.