Eur. Phys. J. C (2011) 71: 1666
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1666-6

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Heavy-flavour spectra in high-energy nucleus–nucleus collisions

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica Teorica dell’Università di Torino, via P.Giuria 1, 10125, Torino, Italy
² Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Torino, via P.Giuria 1, 10125, Torino, Italy
³ Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi, Piazza del Viminale 1, Roma, Italy
⁴ Physics Department, Theory Unit, CERN, 1211, Genève 23, Switzerland

^* e-mail: depace@to.infn.it

Received: 1 February 2011
Published online: 1 June 2011

Abstract

The propagation of the heavy quarks produced in relativistic nucleus–nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC is studied within the framework of Langevin dynamics in the background of an expanding deconfined medium described by ideal and viscous hydrodynamics. The transport coefficients entering into the relativistic Langevin equation are evaluated by matching the hard-thermal-loop result for soft collisions with a perturbative QCD calculation for hard scatterings. The heavy-quark spectra thus obtained are employed to compute the differential cross sections, the nuclear modification factors R _AA and the elliptic-flow coefficients v ₂ of electrons from heavy-flavor decay.