T-matrix approach to heavy quark diffusion in the QGP

Abstract

We assess transport properties of heavy quarks in the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) using static heavy-quark (HQ) potentials from lattice-QCD calculations in a Brueckner many-body T-matrix approach to evaluate elastic heavy-quark–light-quark scattering amplitudes. In the attractive meson and diquark channels, resonance states are formed for temperatures up to ∼1.5T c, increasing pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients for heavy-quark rescattering in the QGP beyond the expectations from perturbative-QCD calculations. We use these transport coefficients, complemented with perturbative elastic HQ gluon scattering, in a relativistic Langevin simulation to obtain HQ p t distributions and elliptic flow (v 2) under conditions relevant for the hot and dense medium created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The heavy quarks are hadronized to open-charm and -bottom mesons within a combined quark-coalescence fragmentation scheme. The resulting single-electron spectra from their semileptonic decays are confronted with recent data on “non-photonic electrons” in 200 A GeV Au–Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).