No Arabic abstract
We present a study of charm and beauty isolation based on a data-driven method with recent measurements on heavy flavor hadrons and their decay electrons in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}$ = 200 GeV at RHIC. The individual electron $p_{rm T}$ spectra, $R_{rm AA}$ and $v_2$ distributions from charmed and beauty hadron decays are obtained. We find that the electron $R_{rm AA}$ from beauty hadron decays ($R_{rm AA}^{rm brightarrow e}$) is suppressed in minimum bias Au+Au collisions but less suppressed compared with that from charmed hadron decays at $p_{rm T}$ $>$ 3.5 GeV/$c$, which indicates that beauty quark interacts with the hot-dense medium with depositing its energy and is consistent with the mass-dependent energy loss scenario. For the first time, the non-zero electron $v_2$ from beauty hadron decays ($v_2^{rm brightarrow e}$) at $p_{rm T}$ $>$ 3.0 GeV/$c$ is observed and shows smaller elliptic flow compared with that from charmed hadron decays at $p_{rm T}$ $<$ 4.0 GeV/$c$. At 2.5 GeV/$c$ $<$ $p_{rm T}$ $<$ 4.5 GeV/$c$, $v_2^{rm brightarrow e}$ is smaller than a number-of-constituent-quark (NCQ) scaling hypothesis. This suggests that beauty quark is unlikely thermalized and too heavy to be moved in a partonic collectivity in heavy-ion collisions at the RHIC energy.
We report on the measurements of production of various charmed hadrons in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV (including $D^{0}(overline{D^{0}})$ and $Lambda_{c}^{pm}$) obtained via topological reconstruction, utilizing the Heavy Flavor Tracker at STAR. Precise results on the $D^{0}$ yields from the 2014 data are reported for a wide transverse momentum range down to 0 in various centrality bins. With the high-statistics data collected in 2014 and 2016, and the usage of a supervised machine learning algorithm for signal-to-background separation, the first measurement of the centrality and transverse momentum dependences of $Lambda_{c}^{pm}$ production is shown. Finally, the total charm quark cross section extracted from these measurements in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV is presented.
Measurements of three-dimensional correlation functions of like-sign low transverse momentum kaon pairs from Au+Au collisions at top RHIC energy $sqrt s_{NN}$=200 GeV are presented. The extracted kaon source function is narrower than the pion one and does not have the long tail along the pair transverse momentum direction. This indicates a much smaller role of long-lived resonance decays and/or of the emission duration on kaon emission. Three-dimensional Gaussian shape of the kaon source function can be adequately reproduced by Therminator simulations with resonance contributions taken into account. Comparison to pion data at the same energy reveals that the kaon Gaussian radii in the outward and sideward directions scale with the transverse mass $m_T$. In the longitudinal direction, unlike at lower SPS energies, the Gaussian radii do not seem to follow the exact $m_T$ scaling between kaons and pions.
We report the STAR measurements of dielectron ($e^+e^-$) production at midrapidity ($|y_{ee}|<$1) in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}$ = 200,GeV. The measurements are evaluated in different invariant mass regions with a focus on 0.30-0.76 ($rho$-like), 0.76-0.80 ($omega$-like), and 0.98-1.05 ($phi$-like) GeV/$c^{2}$. The spectrum in the $omega$-like and $phi$-like regions can be well described by the hadronic cocktail simulation. In the $rho$-like region, however, the vacuum $rho$ spectral function cannot describe the shape of the dielectron excess. In this range, an enhancement of 1.77$pm$0.11(stat.)$pm$0.24(sys.)$pm$0.33(cocktail) is determined with respect to the hadronic cocktail simulation that excludes the $rho$ meson. The excess yield in the $rho$-like region increases with the number of collision participants faster than the $omega$ and $phi$ yields. Theoretical models with broadened $rho$ contributions through interactions with constituents in the hot QCD medium provide a consistent description of the dilepton mass spectra for the measurement presented here and the earlier data at the Super Proton Synchrotron energies.
We present measurements of elliptic flow ($v_2$) of electrons from the decays of heavy-flavor hadrons ($e_{HF}$) by the STAR experiment. For Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}} = $ 200 GeV we report $v_2$, for transverse momentum ($p_T$) between 0.2 and 7 GeV/c using three methods: the event plane method ($v_{2}${EP}), two-particle correlations ($v_2${2}), and four-particle correlations ($v_2${4}). For Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}$ = 62.4 and 39 GeV we report $v_2${2} for $p_T< 2$ GeV/c. $v_2${2} and $v_2${4} are non-zero at low and intermediate $p_T$ at 200 GeV, and $v_2${2} is consistent with zero at low $p_T$ at other energies. The $v_2${2} at the two lower beam energies is systematically lower than at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}} = $ 200 GeV for $p_T < 1$ GeV/c. This difference may suggest that charm quarks interact less strongly with the surrounding nuclear matter at those two lower energies compared to $sqrt{s_{rm NN}} = 200$ GeV.
We present measurements of $e^+e^-$ production at midrapidity in Au$+$Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV. The invariant yield is studied within the PHENIX detector acceptance over a wide range of mass ($m_{ee} <$ 5 GeV/$c^2$) and pair transverse momentum ($p_T$ $<$ 5 GeV/$c$), for minimum bias and for five centrality classes. The ee yield is compared to the expectations from known sources. In the low-mass region ($m_{ee}=0.30$--0.76 GeV/$c^2$) there is an enhancement that increases with centrality and is distributed over the entire pair pt range measured. It is significantly smaller than previously reported by the PHENIX experiment and amounts to $2.3pm0.4({rm stat})pm0.4({rm syst})pm0.2^{rm model}$ or to $1.7pm0.3({rm stat})pm0.3({rm syst})pm0.2^{rm model}$ for minimum bias collisions when the open-heavy-flavor contribution is calculated with {sc pythia} or {sc mc@nlo}, respectively. The inclusive mass and $p_T$ distributions as well as the centrality dependence are well reproduced by model calculations where the enhancement mainly originates from the melting of the $rho$ meson resonance as the system approaches chiral symmetry restoration. In the intermediate-mass region ($m_{ee}$ = 1.2--2.8 GeV/$c^2$), the data hint at a significant contribution in addition to the yield from the semileptonic decays of heavy-flavor mesons.