Speaker
Description
At RHIC energies, charm quarks are primarily produced in hard partonic scatterings at early
stages of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. This makes them an ideal probe of the Quark-
Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in these collisions, since they experience the whole evolution
of the hot and dense medium. STAR is able to study the interactions of charm quarks with the
QGP through direct reconstruction of hadronic decays of D ± , D 0 , D s , and Λ c ± hadrons. This is
possible thanks to an excellent pointing resolution provided by the Heavy Flavor Tracker.
In this talk, we will present the most recent results on open charm hadron production
from the STAR experiment. In particular, we will discuss the nuclear modification factors of
D ± and D 0 mesons which give access to the charm quark energy loss in the QGP. We will also
discuss D s / D 0 and Λ c ± /D 0 yield ratios as functions of transverse momentum and collision
centrality which help us understand better the charm quark hadronization process in heavy-ion
collisions. In addition, we will present the rapidity-odd directed flow of D 0 mesons, which can
be used to probe the initial tilt of the QGP bulk and effects of early-time magnetic field.
