Heavy Quark and Quarkonium Transport in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

The strong interaction between heavy quarks and the quark gluon plasma makes the open and hidden charm hadrons be sensitive probes of the deconfinement phase transition in high energy nuclear collisions. Both the cold and hot nuclear matter effects change with the colliding energy and significantly influence the heavy quark and charmonium yield and their transverse momentum distributions. The ratio of averaged quarkonium transverse momentum square and the elliptic flow reveal the nature of the QCD medium created in heavy ion collisions at SPS, RHIC and LHC energies.