From Heavy-Flavor Transport to Bulk and Spectral Properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Ralf Rapp (Texas A&M University)

Heavy-flavor particles are believed to be versatile probes of the medium produced in high-energy nuclear collisions. Their masses provide a large scale which implies several benefits in the theoretical and phenomenological analysis of their vacuum and in-medium properties. After an introduction to these aspects, we discuss a many-body approach that allows for a comprehensive description of both bound and scattering states, encompassing quarkonia and the diffusion of open heavy flavor in the quark-gluon plasma and through hadronization. We address the problem of extracting the underlying potential interaction using constraints from lattice QCD results on the heavy-quark free energy and quarkonium correlators. We then examine in how far the properties of the heavy-quark interactions can be utilized to understand the bulk, spectral and transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma, to do justice to the original idea of using the heavy-quark systems as a probe of the medium.