Probing quark gluon plasma properties by heavy flavors

Abstract

The Fokker-Planck (FP) equation has been solved to study the interaction of nonequilibrated heavy quarks with the quark gluon plasma expected to be formed in heavy ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider energies. Solutions of the FP equation have been convoluted with the relevant fragmentation functions to obtain the D and B meson spectra. Results are compared with experimental data measured by the STAR Collaboration. It is found that the present experimental data cannot distinguish p{sub T} spectra obtained from the equilibrium versus the nonequilibrium charm distributions. Data at lower p{sub T} may play a crucial role in making the distinction between the two. The nuclear suppression factor R{sub AA} for nonphotonic single-electron spectra resulting from semileptonic decays of hadrons containing heavy flavors has been evaluated using the present formalism. It is observed that the experimental data on the nuclear suppression factor of nonphotonic electrons can be reproduced within this formalism by enhancing the perturbative QCD cross sections by a factor of 2, provided that the expansion of the bulk matter is governed by the velocity of sound c{sub s}{approx}1/{radical}(4). The ideal-gas equation of state fails to reproduce the data even with enhancement of the perturbative QCD cross sectionsmore » by a factor of 2.« less