We report measurements of charmed hadron production from hadronic ($D^{0}rightarrow Kpi$) and semileptonic ($mu$ and $e$) decays in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC. Analysis of the spectra indicates that charmed hadrons have a different radial flow
pattern from light or multi-strange hadrons. Charm cross sections at mid-rapidity are extracted by combining the three independent measurements, covering the transverse momentum range that contributes to $sim$90% of the integrated cross section. The cross sections scale with number of binary collisions of the initial nucleons, a signature of charm production exclusively at the initial impact of colliding heavy ions. The implications for charm quark interaction and thermalization in the strongly interacting matter are discussed.
We report the first measurement of charmed-hadron ($D^0$) production via the hadronic decay channel ($D^0rightarrow K^- + pi^+$) in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{mathrm{NN}}}}$ = 200,GeV with the STAR experiment. The charm production cross-section p
er nucleon-nucleon collision at mid-rapidity scales with the number of binary collisions, $N_{bin}$, from $p$+$p$ to central Au+Au collisions. The $D^0$ meson yields in central Au+Au collisions are strongly suppressed compared to those in $p$+$p$ scaled by $N_{bin}$, for transverse momenta $p_{T}>3$ GeV/$c$, demonstrating significant energy loss of charm quarks in the hot and dense medium. An enhancement at intermediate $p_{T}$ is also observed. Model calculations including strong charm-medium interactions and coalescence hadronization describe our measurements.
We report measurements of charmed-hadron ($D^{0}$, $D^{*}$) production cross sections at mid-rapidity in $p$ + $p$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 200 GeV by the STAR experiment. Charmed hadrons were reconstructed via the hadronic decays $D^
{0}rightarrow K^{-}pi^{+}$, $D^{*+}rightarrow D^{0}pi^{+}rightarrow K^{-}pi^{+}pi^{+}$ and their charge conjugates, covering the $p_T$ range of 0.6$-$2.0 GeV/$c$ and 2.0$-$6.0 GeV/$c$ for $D^{0}$ and $D^{*+}$, respectively. From this analysis, the charm-pair production cross section at mid-rapidity is $dsigma/dy|_{y=0}^{cbar{c}}$ = 170 $pm$ 45 (stat.) $^{+38}_{-59}$ (sys.) $mu$b. The extracted charm-pair cross section is compared to perturbative QCD calculations. The transverse momentum differential cross section is found to be consistent with the upper bound of a Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm calculation.
