Elliptic flow of heavy-flavor decay electrons in Au+Au collisions at sNN = 27 and 54.4 GeV at RHIC

• Published in: Physics letters. B Vol. 844; p. 138071
• Main Authors: Adams, J.R., Aggarwal, I., Atchison, J., Baker, W., Ball Cap, J.G., Bhatta, S., Brandenburg, J.D., Ceska, J., Chaloupka, P., Chen, J., Das, A., Deppner, I.M., Di Carlo, L., Dixit, P., Dong, X., Drachenberg, J.L., Eppley, G., Eyser, O., Fazio, S., Feng, C.J., Finch, E., Flor, F.A., Galatyuk, T., Geurts, F., He, Y., Huang, T., Huang, X., Huang, Y., Ju, X., Judd, E.G., Kabir, M.L., Kalinkin, D., Kelsey, M., Lebedev, A., Lee, J.H., Li, X., Liang, X., Liang, Y., Liu, C., Liu, H., Liu, L., Liu, Z., Lomicky, O., Loyd, E.M., Lu, T., Luo, X.F., Ma, R., Margetis, S., Mazer, J.A., Mi, K., Mohanty, B., Mukherjee, A., Neff, D., Nemes, D.B., Niida, T., Pandey, A.K., Pawlowska, D., Perkins, C., Pokhrel, B.R., Protzman, T., Prozorova, V., Pruthi, N.K., Przybycien, M., Putschke, J., Qiu, H., Racz, C., Radhakrishnan, S.K., Reed, R., Robotkova, M., Roy Chowdhury, P., Ruan, L., Sato, S., Seger, J., Shao, T., Sharma, R., Shi, S.S., Shou, Q.Y., Sinha, P., Smirnov, N., Stewart, D.J., Stringfellow, B., Su, Y., Sun, C., Sun, Y., Tlusty, D., Trentalange, S., Truhlar, T., Wang, G., Weidenkaff, P.C., Wilks, G., Xie, G., Yan, G., Yang, C., Yang, S., Ye, Z., Zhang, D., Zhang, Y., Zhao, F., Zhou, J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier B.V 10.09.2023; Elsevier
• Subjects: Charm quark spatial diffusion coefficient; Elliptic flow; Heavy-flavor decay electron; NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS; Charm quark spatial diffusion coefficient; Heavy-flavor decay electron; Elliptic flow
• ISSN: 0370-2693; 1873-2445
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2023.138071

We report on new measurements of elliptic flow (v2) of electrons from heavy-flavor hadron decays at mid-rapidity (|y|<0.8) in Au+Au collisions at sNN = 27 and 54.4 GeV from the STAR experiment. Heavy-flavor decay electrons (eHF) in Au+Au collisions at sNN = 54.4 GeV exhibit a non-zero v2 in the transverse momentum (pT) region of pT< 2 GeV/c with the magnitude comparable to that at sNN=200 GeV. The measured eHFv2 at 54.4 GeV is also consistent with the expectation of their parent charm hadron v2 following number-of-constituent-quark scaling as other light and strange flavor hadrons at this energy. These suggest that charm quarks gain significant collectivity through the evolution of the QCD medium and may reach local thermal equilibrium in Au+Au collisions at sNN=54.4 GeV. The measured eHFv2 in Au+Au collisions at sNN= 27 GeV is consistent with zero within large uncertainties. The energy dependence of v2 for different flavor particles (π,ϕ,D0/eHF) shows an indication of quark mass hierarchy in reaching thermalization in high-energy nuclear collisions.