Heavy Flavor, the sQGP and HEFTY

by Ralf Rapp (Texas A&M University)

Tuesday 21 May 2024, 11:00 → 13:00 US/Eastern

Small Seminar Room (https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1618286847?pwd=N20xUlNMYjhJVThoQkp5TktJdmQ5dz09)

Investigating the properties of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP) remains  a topic of great current interest. In particular, an understanding of how the sQGP's remarkable transport properties, as inferred from experiment, emerge from the underlying interactions of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is a formidable challenge. Heavy-flavor particles play a key role in this endeavor. We first give an overview of the current understanding of heavy-flavor (HF) production in heavy-ion collisions based on transport approaches of both open and hidden HF degrees of freedom. This includes heavy-quark diffusion in the QGP and their hadronization as well as the kinetics of heavy quarkonia. We then lay out a unified theoretical framework to compute the underlying transport coefficients based on quantum-many body theory with effective interactions rooted in lattice QCD. This is being realized by the recently formed topical collaboration in nuclear theory, HEFTY.