Thermal production of charm quarks in heavy ion collisions at the Future Circular Collider

By solving the rate equation in an expanding quark-gluon plasma (QGP), we study thermal production of charm quarks in central Pb + Pb collisions at the Future Circular Collider. With the charm quark production cross section taken from the perturbative QCD at the next-to-leading order, we find that charm quark production from the QGP can be appreciable compared to that due to initial hard scattering between colliding nucleons.