Go Heavy with the Flow: Fluid Dynamics of Heavy Quarks

by Federica Capellino (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))

Monday 1 Jun 2026, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

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 talk, I will report the latest results on heavy-quark thermalization in the QGP from a fluid-dynamic perspective. First, I will provide a comparison between a fluid-dynamic and a transport treatment of charm quark dynamics in the plasma. Second, I will show the out-of-equilibrium contribution at freeze-out to integrated yields and momentum spectra of charm hadrons. Finally, I will give a peek into 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, and discuss the possibility of studying of charm-quark dynamics in light-ion collision systems.