Medium modification of heavy flavour production measured by PHENIX in Au + Au collisions at GeV

Abstract

Charm quarks serve as a probe of matter produced in heavy-ion collisions. Due to the large quark mass, the charm cross section is calculable as a point-like QCD process. Since initial-state effects should be small at RHIC energies, the charm yield should follow binary scaling at mid-rapidity. Heavy quarks are expected to lose less energy in the medium than lighter quarks due to the ‘dead-cone effect’. Heavy flavour production can be investigated in PHENIX via the pT spectra of single electrons. While the total charm yield measured from the Au + Au collisions taken by PHENIX in 2002 scales with the number of binary collisions, single-electron pT spectra suggest a strong suppression of the heavy flavour yield at high pT. We present an analysis of the centrality dependence of the electron spectra from heavy quark decays obtained from the high statistics data sample of Au + Au collisions at GeV taken in 2004.