Nonperturbative heavy-flavor transport approach for hot QCD matter

The heavy charm and bottom quarks are unique probes of the transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and its hadronization in high-energy nuclear collisions. A key challenge in this context is to embed the interactions of the heavy quarks in the expanding medium compatible with the strong-coupling nature of the QGP, and thus to unravel the underlying microscopic mechanisms. In the present work we progress toward this goal by combining recent <em>T</em>-matrix interactions for elastic scattering with an effective transport implementation of gluon radiation, and apply these in a Langevin framework in a viscous hydrodynamic evolution. Hadronization of heavy quarks is evaluated using a modern recombination model with 4-momentum conservation, supplemented with fragmentation constrained by data in proton-proton collisions. Deploying this approach to charm-hadron observables in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC yields fair agreement with experiment while also identifying areas of further systematic improvement of the simulations and its current input.. Authors: Krishna, Tharun [Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)] (ORCID:0009000313018496); Rapp, Ralf [Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)] (ORCID:0000000330204402); Fu, Yu [Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States)] (ORCID:0000000228545622); Bass, Steffen A. [Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States)] (ORCID:0000000294510954); Ke, Weiyao [Central China Normal University, Wuhan (China)] (ORCID:0000000256302388). DOE Contract: FG02-05ER41367; SC0023547. Subjects: Heavy-flavor transport; Quark-gluon plasma; Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions