Thermal production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions at the Future Circular Collider

Abstract

By solving the rate equation in an expanding quark–gluon plasma (QGP), we study thermal production of charm quarks in central Pb + Pb collisions at the Future Circular Collider. With the charm quark production cross section taken from the perturbative QCD at the next-to-leading order, we find that charm quark production from the QGP can be appreciable compared to that due to initial hard scattering between colliding nucleons.