A new correlation method to identify and separate charm and bottom production processes at RHIC

摘要

Electrons from semileptonic decays of heavy-flavor mesons (D and B) allow tostudy the energy loss of heavy-quarks in nuclear collisions at sqrt(s) = 200GeV at RHIC. Since pQCD calculations have shown that the crossing point wherebottom decay electrons start to dominate over charm decay electrons is largelyunknown, an urgent need arises to access the relative contributionsindependently. A correlation method is proposed to identify and separate charmand bottom production processes on a statistical basis through tagging of theirdecay electrons and open charmed mesons. The feasibility for this method isdemonstrated using PYTHIA and MC@NLO simulations. The latter allows to estimatethe complete NLO contributions, including e.g. gluon-splitting diagrams.