Single electron yields from semileptonic charm and bottom hadron decays in Au+Au collisions at sNN−−−−√=200 GeV

The PHENIX Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliderhas measured open heavy flavor production in minimum bias Au+Au collisions at sNN−−−−√=200 GeV via the yields of electrons from semileptonic decaysof charm and bottom hadrons. Previous heavy flavor electron measurements indicated substantial modification in the momentum distribution of the parent heavy quarks owing to the quark-gluon plasmacreated in these collisions. For the first time, using the PHENIX silicon vertex detector to measure precision displaced tracking, the relative contributions from charm and bottom hadronsto these electrons as a function of transverse momentum are measured in Au+Au collisions. We compare the fraction of electrons from bottom hadronsto previously published results extracted from electron- hadroncorrelations in p+p collisions at sNN−−−−√=200 GeV and find the fractions to be similar within the large uncertainties on both measurements for pT>4GeV/c. We use the bottomelectron fractions in Au+Au and p+p along with the previously measured heavy flavor electron RAA to calculate the RAA for electrons from charm and bottom hadrondecays separately. We find that electrons from bottom hadrondecays are less suppressed than those from charm for the region 3

Keywords:

• Hadron
• Quark
• Atomic physics
• Nuclear physics
• Plasma
• Physics
• Particle physics
• Quark–gluon plasma
• Electron
• Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
• Particle accelerator
• Momentum

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