Charm Production at RHIC to O(\ALPHA_S^3)

Abstract

We present results on rapidity and transverse momentum distributions of inclusive charm quark production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC, including the next-to-leading order, $O(\alpha_s^3)$, radiative corrections and the nuclear shadowing effect. We find the effective, nuclear K-factor to be $K(y)\approx 1.4$ for $\mid y\mid \leq 3$ in the rapidity distribution, while $1\leq K(p_{T}) \leq 3$ for $1GeV\leq p_T \leq 6GeV$ in the $p_T$ distribution. We incorporate multiple parton scatterings in our calculation of the fraction of all central events that contain at least one charm quark pair. We obtain the effective $A$-dependence of the charm cross sections. Finally, we comment on the possibility of detecting the quark-gluon plasma signal as an enhanced charm production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC.