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Hard probes produced in perturbative processes are excellent probes for the study of the hot and dense QCD matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Transport theory, allowing for coupling to an evolving medium with fluctuating initial conditions, has become a powerful tool in this endeavor. However, the implementation of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect for medium-induced parton bremsstrahlung and pair production poses a challenge to semiclassical transport models based on Boltzmann-type transport equations. In this work, we investigate a possible solution to approximate the LPM effect in a "modified Boltzmann transport" approach, including a prescription for the running coupling constant. By fixing a numerical parameter, this approach quantitatively reproduces the rates of medium-induced parton splitting predicted by the next-to-leading-log solution of the Arnold-Moore-Yaffe equation, which is valid in the deep-LPM regime of an infinite medium. We also find qualitative agreement of our implementation with calculations in a finite and expanding medium, but future improvements are necessary for added precision at small path length. This work benefits transport model-based studies and the usage of these models in the phenomenological extraction of the jet transport coefficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heavy flavor observables provide valuable information on the properties of the hot and dense quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. Various microscopic models have successfully described many of the observables associated with its formation. Their transport coefficients differ, however, due to different assumptions about the underlying interaction of the heavy quarks with the plasma constituents, different initial geometries and formation times, different hadronization processes, and a different time evolution of the QGP. In this study we present the transport coefficients of these models and investigate systematically how some of these assumptions influence the heavy quark properties at the end of the QGP expansion. For this purpose we impose on these models the same initial condition and the same model for the QGP expansion and show that both have considerable influence on RAA and v2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By applying a Bayesian model-to-data analysis, we estimate the temperature and momentum dependence of the heavy quark diffusion coefficient in an improved Langevin framework. The posterior range of the diffusion coefficient is obtained by performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo random walk and calibrating on the experimental data of D-meson RAA and v2 in three different collision systems at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collidaer (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV and Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 and 5.02 TeV. The spatial diffusion coefficient is found to be consistent with lattice QCD calculations and comparable with other models' estimation. We demonstrate the capability of our improved Langevin model to simultaneously describe the RAA and v2 at both RHIC and the LHC energies, as well as the higher order flow coefficient such as D meson v3. We show that by applying a Bayesian analysis, we are able to quantitatively and systematically study the heavy flavor dynamics in heavy-ion collisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of nonequilibrium effects on the dynamics of heavy-ion collisions is investigated by comparing a nonequilibrium transport approach, the Parton-Hadron-String-Dynamics (PHSD), to a 2D+1 viscous hydrodynamical model, which is based on the assumption of local equilibrium and conservation laws. Starting the hydrodynamical model from the same nonequilibrium initial condition as in the PHSD, using an equivalent lQCD equation of state (EoS), the same transport coefficients, i.e., shear viscosity η and the bulk viscosity ζ in the hydrodynamical model, we compare the time evolution of the system in terms of energy density, Fourier transformed energy density, spatial and momentum eccentricities, and ellipticity to quantify the traces of nonequilibrium phenomena. In addition, we also investigate the role of initial pre-equilibrium flow on the hydrodynamical evolution and demonstrate its importance for final state observables. We find that because of nonequilibrium effects, the event-by-event transport calculations show large fluctuations in the collective properties, while ensemble averaged observables are close to the hydrodynamical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several transport models have been employed in recent years to analyze heavy-flavor meson spectra in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Heavy-quark transport coefficients extracted from these models with their default parameters vary, however, by up to a factor of 5 at high momenta. To investigate the origin of this large theoretical uncertainty, a systematic comparison of heavy-quark transport coefficients is carried out between various transport models. Within a common scheme devised for the nuclear modification factor of charm quarks in a brick medium of a quark-gluon plasma, the systematic uncertainty of the extracted drag coefficient among these models is shown to be reduced to a factor of 2, which can be viewed as the smallest intrinsic systematical error band achievable at present time. This indicates the importance of a realistic hydrodynamic evolution constrained by bulk hadron spectra and of heavy-quark hadronization for understanding the final heavy-flavor hadron spectra and extracting heavy-quark drag coefficient. The transverse transport coefficient is less constrained due to the influence of the underlying mechanism for heavy-quark medium interaction. Additional constraints on transport models such as energy loss fluctuation and transverse-momentum broadening can further reduce theoretical uncertainties in the extracted transport coefficients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]