Thermal dilepton signal versus dileptons from open charm and bottom decays in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We analyze the opportunity to observe thermal dileptons emitted off deconfined matter resulting in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Special kinematical conditions provided by the detector systems PHENIX and ALICE, and the so-called ${M}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ scaling behavior of thermal dilepton spectra are taken into account. Our considerations include energy loss effects of the fast heavy quarks in deconfined matter, which for themselves can help to identify the creation of a hot and dense parton medium. Due to a thresholdlike effect for decay leptons we find a window at large transverse pair momentum and fixed transverse mass where the thermal signal can exceed the background of dileptons from correlated semileptonic decays of charm and bottom mesons.