Transport coefficients of heavy baryons

Abstract

We compute the transport coefficients (drag and momentum diffusion) of the low-lying heavy baryons $\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$ in a medium of light mesons formed at the later stages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We employ the Fokker-Planck approach to obtain the transport coefficients from unitarized baryon-meson interactions based on effective field theories that respect chiral and heavy-quark symmetries. We provide the transport coefficients as a function of temperature and heavy-baryon momentum, and analyze the applicability of certain nonrelativistic estimates. Moreover we compare our outcome for the spatial diffusion coefficient to the one coming from the solution of the Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck transport equation and we find a very good agreement between both calculations. The transport coefficients for $\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$ in a thermal bath will be used in a subsequent publication as input in a Langevin evolution code for the generation and propagation of heavy particles in heavy-ion collisions at LHC and RHIC energies.