D -Meson Production via Sequential Hadronization in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions
Abstract
Heavy flavor production serves as an ideal probe of the hadronization mechanism of the quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We study charm-quark hadronization using Langevin transport in the medium together with a sequential coalescence model. Since D_{s} forms earlier than D^{0}, as obtained from the Dirac equation with an in-medium potential extracted from lattice QCD, the D_{s} elliptic flow v_{2} is smaller than the D^{0} v_{2} in the intermediate-p_{T} region, in good agreement with the recent ALICE data. Incorporating sequential coalescence, charm-quark number conservation, and strangeness enhancement predicts a peak in the yield ratio D_{s}/D^{0} at low p_{T}, which can be tested in future heavy-ion collisions.
Fields of Study & Subjects
High-Energy Particle Collisions Research
Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
Complex Systems and Dynamics
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Physical Review Letters
- Publisher
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Volume
- 136
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 232301–232301
- Publication date
- 19 May 2026
- Language
- EN