Heavy Flavor Production and Energy Loss with Two-Particle Correlations at PHENIX

摘要

Heavy quarks are a valuable probe of the hot, dense medium created in a heavyion collision, and are an important test of proposed mechanisms of energy loss.It was discovered that single non-photonic electrons are suppressed at asimilar level to light hadrons, implying a comparable level of energy lossbetween light and heavy partons. Because theory has had a difficult timeexplaining the level of heavy quark energy loss, it is crucial to betterunderstand charm and bottom suppression. Electron-hadron correlations have beenused at PHENIX to study heavy flavor in both p+p and Au+Au collisions. In p+pthe ratio of charm to bottom production has been measured using masscorrelations through a partial reconstruction of the D meson. Electron-hadronangular correlations have also been used to study medium modification of heavyflavor, and we see hints of energy loss effects. A complementary study ofcorrelated electron-muon pairs provides a clean measurement of heavy flavorproduction in a rapidity range not yet studied.