Bochum 2009 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Hadronen und Kerne

HK 3: Heavy Ion Collisions and QCD phases

HK 3.1: Invited Group Report

Monday, March 16, 2009, 14:00–14:30, H-ZO 10

Exploring hot and dense QCD matter with heavy-flavour probes at RHIC — •Andre Mischke — Institute for Subatomic Physics, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Calculations from Lattice-QCD predict that at high energy densities a phase transition between hadronic matter and a deconfined state formed by quarks and gluons, the Quark-Gluon Plasma, occurs. The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, US) has yielded compelling evidence for the formation of this novel state of matter in high energy nuclear collisions. Measurements of the momentum distribution of emitted particles and comparison with hydrodynamic model calculations have shown that the matter behaves almost like an ideal fluid.

The investigation of heavy-flavour production in nuclear collisions provides key tests of parton energy-loss models and, thus, yields profound insight into the properties of the produced highly-dense QCD matter. Theoretical models based on perturbative QCD predict that heavy quarks should experience smaller energy loss than light quarks when propagating through the extremely dense medium due to the mass-dependent suppression (so-called dead-cone effect). Moreover, heavy quarks allow testing predictions from AdS/CFT, a formalism which provides a conjectured connection between strongly interacting gauge theories and string theory.

In this talk, recent results on charm and bottom production at RHIC and perspectives at CERN's Large Hadron Collider are reviewed.