Speaker
Description
Hadrons carrying heavy quarks, i.e. charm or bottom, are
important probes of the hot and dense medium created in relativistic
heavy-ion collisions. Heavy quark-antiquark pairs are mainly produced
in initial hard scattering processes of partons. While some of the
produced pairs form bound quarkonia, the vast majority hadronize into
particles carrying open heavy flavor. The PHENIX Collaboration carries
out a comprehensive physics program which studies open heavy flavor
and quarkonium production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at
RHIC. The discovery at RHIC of large high-pT suppression and flow of
electrons from heavy quarks flavors have altered our view of the hot
and dense matter formed in central Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV. These
results suggest a large energy loss and flow of heavy quarks in the
hot, dense matter. In recent years, the PHENIX has installed a silicon
vertex tracker both in central rapidity (VTX) and in forward rapidity
(FVTX) regions, and has collected large data samples. These two
silicon trackers enhance the capability of heavy flavor measurements
via precision tracking.
This talk summarizes the latest PHENIX results concerning open and
closed charm and beauty heavy quark production as a function of
rapidity, energy and system size, and their interpretation with
respect to the current theoretical understanding on this topic.
| On behalf of collaboration: | PHENIX |
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