1208.0057 (David Tlusty)

Open charm hadron production via hadronic decays at STAR    [PDF]

David Tlusty

Heavy quarks are a unique probe to study the medium produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. The dominant process of charm quark production at RHIC is believed to be initial gluon fusion which can be calculated in the perturbative QCD. The upper limit of FONLL calculation seems to be in good agreement with charm cross section measurements at mid-rapidity in $p+p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV provided by STAR. The same measurement in Au+Au collisions at equal energy reveals the number-of-binary-collisions scaling of charm cross section indicating that charm production is dominated by initial hard scatterings. In this article, we report the measurements of $D^{0}$, $D^{*}$ in $p+p$ at 0.6 GeV/$c < p_T < 6$ GeV/$c$ and $D^0$ in Au+Au collisions at 0.2 GeV/$c < p_T < 5$ GeV/$c$ via hadronic decays $D^{0}\rightarrow K^-\pi^+,\ D^{*+}\rightarrow D^0\pi^+\rightarrow K^-\pi^+\pi^+$ at mid-rapidity $|y|<1$. {abstract}

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0057