Can one discriminate the thermal dilepton signal against the open charm and bottom decay background in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions?

Abstract

In ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at $\sqrt{s}>$ 20 (120) A$\cdot$GeV a copious production of charm (bottom) production sets in which, via correlated semileptonic $D\bar{D}$ ($B\bar{B}$) decays, gives rise to a dilepton yield at invariant mass $M\approx$ 2 -- 3 GeV in excess of the Drell-Yan yield and the thermal dilepton signal from deconfined matter as well. We show that appropriate single-electron transverse momentum cuts (suitable for ALICE at LHC) cause a threshold like behavior of the dilepton spectra from heavy-quark meson decays and the Drell-Yan process and can allow to observe a thermal dilepton signal from hot deconfined matter.

Comments: 14 LaTeX pages including eps figures