Heavy quark production from jet conversions in a quark-gluon plasma

Recently, it has been demonstrated that the chemical composition of jets in heavy ion collisions is significantly altered compared to the jets in the vacuum. This signal can be used to probe the medium formed in nuclear collisions. In this study we investigate the possibility that fast light quarks and gluons can convert to heavy quarks when passing through a quark-gluon plasma. We study the rate of light to heavy jet conversions in a consistent Fokker-Planck framework and investigate their impact on the production of high-$p_T$ charm and bottom quarks at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider.

Figure 1

Transport coefficients $\gamma ,B_0$, and $B_1$ of charm (top panels) and bottom quarks (bottom panels) in a QGP as functions of transverse momentum $p_T$ at different temperatures $T$.

Figure 2

Conversion widths for charm (left panel) and bottom (right panel) in a QGP due to the process $g+g\to Q+\overline{Q}$ as functions of transverse momentum $p_T$ of the incoming gluon jets at different temperatures $T$.

Figure 3

Average final state momentum of the heavy quark for charm (left panel) and bottom (right panel) after conversion from gluons with momentum $p$ for two different temperatures.

Figure 4

The ratio of heavy quarks from jet conversions to heavy quarks from initial production with energy loss included for charm (left panel) and bottom (right panel) as functions of transverse momentum $p_T$ in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathit{NN}}}=200$ GeV.

Figure 5

The ratio of heavy quark spectrum from initial production to that from jet conversions for charm (left panel) and bottom (right panel) as functions of transverse momentum in $\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}$ collisions at$\sqrt{s_{\mathit{NN}}}=5.5$ TeV.