Thermal production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions at Future Circular Collider

Abstract

By solving the rate equation in an expanding quark-gluon plasma, we study thermal production of charm quarks in central Pb+Pb collisions at the Future Circular Collider. With the charm quark production cross section taken from the perturbative QCD at the next-to-leading order, we find that charm quark production from the quark-gluon plasma can be appreciable compared to that due to initial hard scattering between colliding nucleons.