Suppression of nonphotonic electrons from enhancement of charm baryons in heavy ion collisions

In Au+Au collisions at 2 < p(T)< 6 GeV/c baryon production is enhanced compared to p+p collisions. Since charm baryon decays produce electrons less frequently than charm meson decays, the nonphotonic electron spectrum is sensitive to the Lambda(c)/D ratio. In this report we study the dependence of the nonphotonic electron spectrum on the baryon-to-meson ratio for charm hadrons. As an example, we take the Lambda(c)/D ratio to have the same form as the Lambda/K-S(0) ratio. In this case, even if the total charm quark yield in Au+Au collisions scales with the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions (N-bin), the electron spectrum at 2 < p(T)< 5 GeV/c is suppressed by as much as 20% relative to N-bin scaled p+p collisions.