UC Berkeley

A sizable contribution to heavy-quark production in high-energy hadronic and nuclear collisions comes from heavy quark-antiquark pair production from gluon splitting during the parton shower evolution. We investigate the effect of gluon-medium interaction on open heavy flavor spectra in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The interaction of hard gluons and heavy quarks with the hot QCD medium is simulated by utilizing a Langevin transport model that simultaneously incorporates contributions from collisional and radiative processes. It is found that, while the gluon splitting channel has quite an important contribution to the single D-meson production cross section, its influence on the final heavy-meson nuclear modification turns out to be quite modest because the average lifetime of hard gluons is short before splitting into heavy-quark-antiquark pairs during the evolution and propagation of the parton shower.