Heavy quarks (charm and bottom quarks) serve as effective probes to characterize the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in heavy-ion collision experiments. As heavy flavor particles exist at all stages of the collision event, the analysis considered many aspects of heavy-ion physics: heavy quark production, its evolution in expanding medium, and the hadronization process. The Brownian motion of heavy quark in the QGP is studied within the Langevin approach, where its interactions with medium particles are embedded through the drag and diffusion coefficients. We demonstrate the effects of viscous corrections to the charm quark transport in an expanding medium. We study the role of interaction strength of heavy quarks in the expanding medium, including elastic collisional processes with medium constituents and gluon emission processes, in heavy quark dynamics. The properties of the QGP medium are probed by analyzing the heavy meson nuclear modification factor and flow coefficient for Pb+Pb collision. Finally, I will briefly discuss the impact of a magnetic field on heavy quark transport and its possible implications on heavy flavor observables.
Nobuyuki Matsumoto