Suppression of nonphotonic electrons from enhancement of charm baryons in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

At intermediate transverse momentum (2 < p_T < 6 GeV/c), baryon production in Au+Au collisions is enhanced compared to p+p collisions. Since charm baryon decays produce electrons less frequently than charm meson decays, the non-photonic electron spectrum is sensitive to the Lambda_c/D ratio. In this report we study the dependence of the non-photonic electron spectrum on the baryon-to-meson ratio for charm hadrons. As an example, we take the Lambda_c/D ratio to have the same form as the Lambda/K^0_S ratio. In this case, even if the total charm quark yield in Au+Au collisions scales with the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions (N_bin), the electron spectrum at 2 < p_T < 5 GeV/c is suppressed relative to N_bin scaled p+p collisions by as much as 20%.