We present results for the quenching, elliptic flow and azimuthal correlations of heavy flavour particles in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions obtained through the POWLANG transport setup, developed in the past to study the propagation of heavy
quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma and here extended to include a modeling of their hadronization in the presence of a medium. Hadronization is described as occurring via the fragmentation of strings with endpoints given by the heavy (anti-)quark Q(Qbar) and a thermal parton qbar(q) from the medium. The flow of the light quarks is shown to affect significantly the R_AA and v_2 of the final D mesons, leading to a better agreement with the experimental data. The approach allows also predictions for the angular correlation between heavy-flavour hadrons (or their decay electrons) and the charged particles produced in the fragmentation of the heavy-quark strings.
By coupling a doorway state to a see of random background states, we develop the theory of doorway states in the framework of the random-phase approximation (RPA). Because of the symmetry of the RPA equations, that theory is radically different from
the standard description of doorway states in the shell model. We derive the Pastur equation in the limit of large matrix dimension and show that the results agree with those of matrix diagonalization in large spaces. The complexity of the Pastur equation does not allow for an analytical approach that would approximately describe the doorway state. Our numerical results display unexpected features: The coupling of the doorway state with states of opposite energy leads to strong mutual attraction.
As a function of energy E, the average strength function S(E) of a doorway state is commonly assumed to be Lorentzian in shape and characterized by two parameters, the peak energy E_0 and the spreading width Gamma. The simple picture is modified when
the density of background states that couple to the doorway state changes significantly in an energy interval of size Gamma. For that case we derive an approximate analytical expression for S(E). We test our result successfully against numerical simulations. Our result may have important implications for shell--model calculations.
We update our recent calculation of quarkonium Euclidean correlators at finite temperatures in a potential model by including the effect of zero modes in the lattice spectral functions. These contributions cure most of the previously observed discrep
ancies with lattice calculations, supporting the use of potential models at finite temperature as an important tool to complement lattice studies.
