Heavy flavors in heavy-ion collisions: quenching, flow and correlations

We present results for the quenching, elliptic flow and azimuthal correlations of heavy-flavor particles in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions obtained through the POWLANG transport setup, developed in the past to study the propagation of heavy quarks in the Quark–Gluon Plasma and here extended to include a modeling of their hadronization in the presence of a medium. Hadronization is described as occurring via the fragmentation of strings with endpoints given by the heavy (anti-) quark \(Q(\overline{Q})\) and a thermal parton \(\overline{q}(q)\) from the medium. The flow of the light quarks is shown to affect significantly the \(R_\mathrm{AA}\) and \(v_2\) of the final \(D\) mesons, leading to a better agreement with the experimental data. The approach allows also predictions for the angular correlation between heavy-flavor hadrons (or their decay electrons) and the charged particles produced in the fragmentation of the heavy-quark strings.