Measurements of open charm hadrons in Au+Au collisions at the STAR experiment

Abstract

Charm quarks possess a large mass and thus they are expected to be primarily produced during the initial stages of heavy-ion collisions. Hot and dense nuclear matter, usually referred to as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), can also be created in these collisions. Therefore, the QGP can be studied using charm quarks as penetrating probes via measurements of the parton energy loss and collective behavior, which are directly related to the intrinsic properties of the medium. In particular, a mass ordering of the parton energy loss in the hot medium is predicted, i.e. heavy-flavor quarks are expected to lose less energy than light quarks. Moreover, STAR has measured several species of charm hadrons and, therefore, can probe several modes of charm quark hadronization in the medium. In these proceedings we report on the most recent measurements of the production of D$^0$ and D$^\pm$, as well as D$_\mathrm{s}$, containing a strange quark, and the $\Lambda_\mathrm{c}$ baryon in Au+Au collisions at the center-of-mass energy per nucleon-nucleon pair of $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} = 200\,\,$GeV. These particles are reconstructed via their hadronic decay channels, where the daughter particles are tracked and identified with excellent precision.