Temperature dependence of the properties of open heavy-flavor mesons

Abstract

We address the modification of open heavy-flavor mesons in a hot medium of light mesons within an effective theory approach consistent with chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries and the use of the imaginarytime formalism to introduce the non-zero temperature effects to the theory. The unitarized scattering amplitudes, the ground-state self-energies and the corresponding spectral functions are calculated self-consistently. We use the thermal ground-state spectral functions obtained with this methodology to further calculate 1) open-charm meson Euclidean correlators, and 2) off-shell transport coefficients in the hadronic phase.Heavy quarks, produced in large abundance in the initial stage in heavy-ion collisions at LHC and RHIC, are a unique probe of the matter formed. Open heavy-flavor mesons are created at the confinement transition and they interact with the light mesons in a hot medium at vanishing baryon density. In this paper we study open heavy-flavor mesons in hot matter, while comparing our results to lattice QCD (LQCD) data and analyzing the implications for their propagation in heavy ion collisions.