Abstract
We report on the first measurement of charm-strange meson production at midrapidity in collisions at from the STAR experiment. The yield ratio between strange () and nonstrange () open-charm mesons is presented and compared to model calculations. A significant enhancement, relative to a pythia simulation of collisions, is observed in the yield ratio in collisions over a large range of collision centralities. Model calculations incorporating abundant strange-quark production in the quark-gluon plasma and coalescence hadronization qualitatively reproduce the data. The transverse-momentum integrated yield ratio of at midrapidity is consistent with a prediction from a statistical hadronization model with the parameters constrained by the yields of light and strange hadrons measured at the same collision energy. These results suggest that the coalescence of charm quarks with strange quarks in the quark-gluon plasma plays an important role in -meson production in heavy-ion collisions.
- Received 28 January 2021
- Revised 12 May 2021
- Accepted 21 July 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.092301
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society