Open Heavy Flavor in QCD Matter and in Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

We review the experimental and theoretical status of open heavy-flavor (HF) production in high-energy nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC. We first overview the theoretical concepts and pertinent calculations of HF transport in QCD matter, including perturbative and non-perturbative approaches in the quark-gluon plasma, effective models in hadronic matter, as well as implementations of heavy-quark (HQ) hadronization. This is followed by a brief discussion of bulk evolution models for heavy-ion collisions and initial conditions for the HQ distributions which are needed to calculate HF spectra in comparison to observables. We then turn to a discussion of experimental data that have been collected to date at RHIC and LHC, specifically for the nuclear suppression factor and elliptic flow of semileptonic HF decays, D mesons, non-prompt $J/ψ$ from B-meson decays, and b-jets. Model comparisons to HF data are conducted with regards to extracting the magnitude, temperature and momentum-dependence of HF transport coefficients from experiment.

89 pages, 30 figures, review article