The impact of glasma on heavy quark spectra and correlations

¹ Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland
² Helsinki Institute of Physics, P.O. Box 64, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia 64, I-95123 Catania, Italy
⁴ INFN-Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Via S. Sofia 62, I-95123 Catania, Italy
⁵ Institute for Theoretical Physics, TU Wien, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8, A-1040 Vienna, Austria

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Published online: 5 November 2025

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the glasma classical color fields, produced in the very early stage of heavy-ion collisions, on the transport of heavy quarks. The glasma fields evolve according to the classical Yang-Mills equations, while the dynamics of heavy quarks is described by Wong’s equations. We numerically solve these equations and extract observables sensitive to the initial glasma stage. The heavy quark nuclear modification factor R_AA is affected by the glasma but the effect is moderate compared to the nPDF contribution. Our main finding is that the glasma has a large impact on the azimuthal correlation between QQ pairs, initially produced back-to-back.