Measurement of electrons from heavy-flavor decays from p+p, d+Au, and Cu+Cu collisions in the PHENIX experiment

Lim, S. H. and Adare, A. and Afanasiev, S. and Aidala, C. and Ajitanand, N. N. and Akiba, Y. and Akimoto, R. and Al-Bataineh, H. and Al-Ta'ani, H. and Alexander, J. and Alfred, M. and Andrews, K. R. and Angerami, A. and Aoki, K. and Apadula, N. and Aphecetche, L. and Appelt, E. and Aramaki, Y. and Armendariz, R. and Aronson, S. H. and Asai, J. and Asano, H. and Aschenauer, E. C. and Atomssa, E. T. and Averbeck, R. and Awes, T. C. and Azmoun, B. and Babintsev, V. and Bai, M. and Bai, X. and Csanád, Máté and Csörgő, Tamás and Imrek, József and Kiss, Árpád and Varga-Kőfaragó, Mónika and Nagy, Márton and Novák, Tamás and Ster, András and Sziklai, János István and Tarján, Péter and Vargyas, Márton and Vértesi, Róbert and Zimányi, József (2014) Measurement of electrons from heavy-flavor decays from p+p, d+Au, and Cu+Cu collisions in the PHENIX experiment. NUCLEAR PHYSICS A, 931. pp. 525-529. ISSN 0375-9474

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Abstract

Charm and bottom quarks are formed predominantly by gluon fusion in the initial hard scatterings at RHIC, making them good probes of the full medium evolution. Previous measurements at RHIC have shown large suppression and azimuthal anisotropy of open heavy-flavor hadrons in Au+Au collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV. Explaining the simultaneously large suppression and flow of heavy quarks has been challenging. To further understand the heavy-flavor transport in the hot and dense medium, it is imperative to also measure cold nuclear matter effects which affect the initial distribution of heavy quarks as well as the system size dependence of the final state suppression. In this talk, new measurements by the PHENIX collaboration of electrons from heavy- flavor decays in p+p, d+Au, and Cu+Cu collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV are presented. In particular, a surprising enhancement of intermediate transverse momentum heavy-flavor decay leptons in d+Au at mid and backward rapidity are also seen in mid-central Cu+Cu collisions. This enhancement is much larger than the expectation from anti-shadowing of the parton distributions and is theoretically unexplained.

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