Combination of Heavy Quark with Partons from Quark-Gluon Matter: a Scaling Probe

Abstract

In relativistic heavy ion collisions, the cross section of heavy hadron production via the combination of a heavy quark with a light one from the quark-gluon matter can be factorized. It is the convolution of twist-4 combination matrix elements, the parameters corresponding to the parton distributions of the quark-gluon matter, as well as the hard partonic cross section of heavy quark production calculable in PQCD. These parton distributions and combination matrix elements are functions of a scaling variable which is the momentum fraction of the heavy quark w.r.t. the heavy hadron. In the same factorization framework, the combination matrix elements appear in other `simpler' processes and can be extracted. Taking them as inputs, comparing with data from RHIC and (future) LHC, we can get the parton distributions of the quark-gluon matter just as the similar way we get those of nucleon, pion, or photon, etc..