Physics Letters B 798 (2019) 134933
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Impact of Glasma on heavy quark observables in nucleus-nucleus
collisions at LHC
Yifeng Sun
a,∗
, Gabriele Coci
a,b,c
, Santosh Kumar Das
d
, Salvatore Plumari
c,a
,
Marco Ruggieri
e
, Vincenzo Greco
a,c
a
Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, INFN-LNS, Via S. Sofia 62, I-95123 Catania, Italy
b
Centro Siciliano di Fisica Nucleare e Struttura della Materia, CSFNSM, Via S. Sofia 64, I-95125 Catania, Italy
c
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia 64, 1-95125 Catania, Italy
d
School of Physical Science, Indian Institute of Technology Goa, Ponda-403401, Goa, India
e
School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Lanzhou University, 222 South Tianshui Road, Lanzhou 730000, China
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
26 February 2019
Received
in revised form 3 September 2019
Accepted
10 September 2019
Available
online 12 September 2019
Editor:
J.-P. Blaizot
In the pre-thermal equilibrium stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, a strong quasi-classical transverse
gluon field emerges at about τ
0
0.1fm/c and evolves together with their longitudinal counterparts
according to the classical Yang-Mills (CYM) equations. Recently it has been shown that these fields induce
a diffusion of charm quarks in momentum space resulting in a tilt of their spectrum without a significant
drag. We find that in nucleus-nucleus collisions at LHC such a novel dynamics of charm quarks leads to
an initial enhancement of the nuclear modification factor (R
AA
) at p
T
larger than 2GeV/c contrary to the
standard lore. Moreover, the same dynamics leads to a larger final elliptic flow (v
2
) inducing a relation
between R
AA
and v
2
that is quite close to the experimental measurements. Our study also shows that
such an initial pre-thermal stage is unlikely to be described in terms of a standard drag and diffusion
dynamics, because even if one tune such coefficients to reproduce the same R
AA
(p
T
) this would imply a
significantly smaller v
2
.
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
The relativistic heavy-ion program provides the possibility to
scrutiny Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram at finite
temperature and density in the region where a transition of nu-
clear
matter into a plasma of quarks and gluons (QGP) has been
predicted. In particular, in the last decade the main properties of
such a matter have been studied both at the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), clarifying
that the high temperature medium created in high energy nuclear
collisions is characterized by a large scattering rate and thus a low
shear viscosity over entropy density ratio, in disagreement with
the naive expectation of a weakly coupled plasma.
Heavy
quarks (Charm and Beauty) have been considered to have
a unique role in such a study since they are generated in the early
stage τ
0
m
−1
HQ
< O(10
−1
) fm/c according to next-to leading or-
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: sunyfphy@lns.infn.it (Y. Sun), coci@lns.infn.it (G. Coci),
santosh@iitgoa.ac.in (S.K. Das), salvatore.plumari@ct.infn.it (S. Plumari),
ruggieri@lzu.edu.cn (M. Ruggieri), greco@lns.infn.it (V. Greco).
der perturbative QCD and hence are witness of the entire evolution
of the QGP; furthermore because M
HQ
>> T
c
they still preserve
their “identity” at hadronization by picking-up a light quark or un-
dergoing
an independent fragmentation. These properties, together
with a thermalization time τ
therm
that is comparable to the lifetime
of the QGP phase [1,2], makes them a probe able to preserve key
information about the time evolution of their interaction in the hot
QCD medium. In addition, it is in perspective possible to perform a
direct comparison of the transport properties of the heavy quarks
with lattice QCD (lQCD) calculations. Recently, it has been shown
that the determination of the space-diffusion transport coefficient
D
s
from the phenomenology [1,3]is in agreement with first lQCD
calculations in quenched approximation [4,5], even if within still
significant uncertainty both in the phenomenology as well as in
the lQCD approach.
The
study of the HQ physics in AA collisions has been success-
ful
and also has clearly shown that in the low momentum regime
p
T
< 10 GeV the interaction is strongly non-perturbative and im-
plies
a space diffusion coefficient 2π TD
s
∼ 2 − 5around T
c
[1].
The determination of such a coefficient is mainly driven by the
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2019.134933
0370-2693/
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.