Impact of glasma on heavy flavor azimuthal correlations and spectra

Abstract

We study the phenomenological impact of the preequilibrium glasma initial stage of heavy-ion collisions on heavy quark azimuthal correlations and spectra. Using our numerical solver, we simulate the transport of heavy quark test particles in an SU(3) glasma background field. The glasma field equations are formulated using classical real-Time lattice gauge theory, and the heavy quark dynamics are described by classical transport equations numerically solved using the colored particle-in-cell method. For the first time, the effect of the glasma stage on the azimuthal correlations of cc¯ and bb¯ pairs is studied. The resulting azimuthal width σΔφ exhibits a large and quick decorrelation due to the strong glasma fields. Further, we evaluate how the pT-broadening in the glasma affects heavy quark pT-spectra, which are initialized according to the Fixed-Order Next-To-Leading Logarithm (FONLL) heavy quark production calculation. The nuclear modification factor RAA is extracted for c and b quarks in the glasma and additional nuclear PDF effects accounting for gluon shadowing are included.