Abstract
Recent theoretical explanations for how hydrodynamic-like flow can build up quickly in small collision systems (hydrodynamization) has led to a microscopic picture of flow building up in a gluon-dominated phase before chemical equilibrium between quarks and gluons has been attained. The goal of this contribution to Offshell-2021 is to explore consequence of assuming a long-lived gluon-dominated phase, which we shall denote a gluon plasma (GP). As these consequences are naturally enhanced in a large systems, we assume and explore the extreme scenario in which a GP would be created in AA collisions and exist for significant time before the formation of a chemically-equilibrated quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The GP and its formation would be impossible to probe with light-quark hadrons, which are first produced later in this scenario. As charm quarks are produced early in the collision, they can circumvent the limitations of light quarks and we propose charm balance functions as an effective tool to test this idea and constrain the dynamics of the GP.
Highlights
One of the biggest open questions in the study of heavy-ion collisions is how the initial interactions lead to the formation of a strongly-interacting medium
What is new in this paper is the idea of the gluon plasma (GP) and how to probe it with charm balance functions, the specific ideas of Sect. 4, but maybe most importantly we hope to convince the reader that these types of correlation measurements, that are extremely challenging from an experimental point of view, are no longer “nice to have” but really something we “need to have” as a community
The dynamics of the GP, which is critical for understanding the build up of flow, might be invisible to light quark hadrons as they are first produced after the system is already flowing
Summary
One of the biggest open questions in the study of heavy-ion collisions is how the initial interactions lead to the formation of a strongly-interacting medium. The existence of a significant GP phase could provide novel insights into some open theoretical issues, and presents experimental challenges: if true, it would imply that light quarks are produced late in the collision evolution and so light hadrons will likely be less sensitive to early-time dynamics. For this reason, we propose to use low pT charm quarks to study the dynamics of the hydrodynamization process.
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