Quark coalescence for charmed mesons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

We investigate effects of charm-quark interactions in a quark-gluon plasma on the production of D and J/psi mesons in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Employing a previously constructed coalescence model that successfully reproduces the transverse momentum (PT) spectra and elliptic flow (v(2) (PT)) of light hadrons at RHIC from underlying light-quark distributions at the phase transition temperature T-c, D-meson and J/psi PT-spectra are evaluated. For the charm-quark distributions, we consider two limiting scenarios: (i) no rescattering, corresponding to perturbative QCD (pQCD) spectra and (ii) complete thermalization including transverse expansion. We find that D-mesons acquire a minimal v(2) inherited from their light-quark content and corresponding semileptonic decay spectra of single electrons practically preserve the v(2) of the parent particles, exhibiting marked differences between the pQCD and thermal scenarios for p(T) greater than or equal to I GeV. Likewise, the p(T)-spectra and yields of J/psi's differ appreciably in the two scenarios. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.