Eur. Phys. J. C (2009) 61: 799-806
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-008-0838-5

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

T-matrix approach to heavy quark diffusion in the QGP

¹ Institut für Theoretische Physik, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Heinrich-Buff-Ring 16, 35392, Giessen, Germany
² Instituto de Ciencias del Espacio (IEEC/CSIC), 08193, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain
³ INFN-LNS, Via S. Sofia 62, 95125, Catania, Italy
⁴ Dipartimento Interateneo di Fisica di Bari, Via Amendola 173, 70126, Bari, Italy
⁵ Cyclotron Institute and Physics Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-3366, USA

^* e-mail: hendrik.vanhees@theo.physik.uni-giessen.de

Received: 27 August 2008
Published online: 9 January 2009

Abstract

We assess transport properties of heavy quarks in the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) using static heavy-quark (HQ) potentials from lattice-QCD calculations in a Brueckner many-body T-matrix approach to evaluate elastic heavy-quark–light-quark scattering amplitudes. In the attractive meson and diquark channels, resonance states are formed for temperatures up to ∼1.5T _c, increasing pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients for heavy-quark rescattering in the QGP beyond the expectations from perturbative-QCD calculations. We use these transport coefficients, complemented with perturbative elastic HQ gluon scattering, in a relativistic Langevin simulation to obtain HQ p _t distributions and elliptic flow (v ₂) under conditions relevant for the hot and dense medium created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The heavy quarks are hadronized to open-charm and -bottom mesons within a combined quark-coalescence fragmentation scheme. The resulting single-electron spectra from their semileptonic decays are confronted with recent data on “non-photonic electrons” in 200 A GeV Au–Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).