Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 6: Heavy-Ion Collisions and QCD Phases I

HK 6.1: Gruppenbericht

Montag, 16. März 2026, 16:15–16:45, PHIL C 601

Thermalization of heavy quarks in heavy-ion collisions: a fluid-dynamic perspective — •Federica Capellino — GSI Helmholtzzentrum Darmstadt

Heavy quarks (i.e. charm and beauty) are powerful tools to characterize the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and at RHIC top energies. Although they are initially produced out of kinetic equilibrium via hard partonic scattering processes, recent measurements of the anisotropic flow of charmed hadrons pose the question of a possible thermalization of heavy quarks in the medium. By exploiting a mapping between transport theory and hydrodynamics, we developed in recent years a fluid-dynamic description of heavy-quark diffusion in the QCD plasma. In this contribution, I will report the latest results on heavy-quark thermalization in the QGP from our fluid-dynamic perspective. First, we compute the out-of-equilibrium corrections to the heavy-quark phase-space distribution, enabling a consistent description of both integrated yields and momentum spectra of charm hadrons. Second, we explore a 2+1-dimensional fluid-dynamic treatment of charm diffusion to study the development of charm anisotropic flow in both heavy- and light-ion collision systems. Finally, we investigate the universality of the fluid-dynamic description of heavy quarks by searching for attractor solutions that are insensitive to the details of the initial conditions.

This work is funded via the DFG ISOQUANT Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1225).

Keywords: heavy quarks; quark-gluon plasma; fluid dynamics