Langevin dynamics of heavy flavors in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We study the stochastic dynamics of c and b quarks, produced in hard initial processes, in the hot medium created after the collision of two relativistic heavy ions. This is done through the numerical solution of the relativistic Langevin equation. The latter requires the knowledge of the friction and diffusion coefficients, whose microscopic evaluation is performed treating separately the contribution of soft and hard collisions. The evolution of the background medium is described by ideal/viscous hydrodynamics. Below the critical temperature the heavy quarks are converted into hadrons, whose semileptonic decays provide single-electron spectra to be compared with the current experimental data measured at RHIC. We focus on the nuclear modification factor R_AA and on the elliptic-flow coefficient v_2, getting, for sufficiently large p_T, a reasonable agreement.