Charm Quark Production in Non-central Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

The effect of gluon shadowing on charm quark production in large impact parameter ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is investigated. Charm production cross sections are calculated for a range of non-central impact parameters which can be accurately inferred from the global transverse energy distribution. We show that charm production is a good probe of the local parton density which determines the effectiveness of shadowing. The spatial dependence of shadowing can only be studied in heavy ion collisions.

Comments: 28 pages with 8 figures