Speaker
J. Matthew Durham
(Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Description
The flexibility of the beam species available at the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider has enabled the PHENIX Collaboration to examine
open heavy flavor production across a wide range of temperature,
energy density, and system size. Charm and bottom production in
$p+p$ collisions, which is dominated by gluon fusion, is largely
consistent with FONLL pQCD calculations. New analysis techniques
have extended the momentum coverage and provide constraints on the
bottom cross section. Measurements in $d+$Au collisions exhibit a
strong cold nuclear matter Cronin enhancement of electrons from
$D-$mesons, which is roughly consistent with the mass-ordering
observed for the lighter $\pi, K,$ and $p$ families. This also
shows that the nuclear baseline for interpreting Au+Au data could be
significantly modified from the $p+p$ shape. Collisions of Cu
nuclei provide a crucial intermediary testing ground between the
small $d$+Au collision system and the large Au+Au system, and show
how the cold nuclear matter enhancement is overtaken by competing
hot nuclear matter suppression as the system size increases towards
the most central Au+Au collisions. The status of finalizing these results results and others will be discussed, in the context of recent measurements at RHIC and the LHC.
Primary author
J. Matthew Durham
(Los Alamos National Laboratory)
