Speaker
Description
We investigate the dynamics of heavy quarks during the initial stages of relativistic nuclear collisions. The initial pre-equilibrium stage of heavy-ion collisions, commonly known as Glasma, evolves according to the classical Yang-Mills (CYM) equations. Heavy quarks are coupled to the evolving Glasma fields via relativistic kinetic theory. We compute the momentum broadening as well as the angular momentum fluctuations of charm and beauty quarks in the early stage, which turn out to be anisotropic due to the anisotropy of the background gluon fields. We observe that transverse momentum broadening for heavy quarks evolves as $\sigma_p \propto t^2$ in the presence of background Glasma fields. This non-Markovian diffusion of heavy quarks in the early stages is explained by the memory effect present in the gluon fields. Furthermore, we also estimate the HQ spatial diffusion coefficient $2 \pi T D_x$ in the pre-equilibrium phase. The $D_x$ obtained in the pre-equilibrium phase is quite close to the value obtained within pQCD in the QGP phase. Notably, $D_x$ follows a continuous evolution from the pre-equilibrium phase to the QGP phase.
| Category | Theory |
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