Speaker
Description
Recent observation of collective phenomena in small colliding systems challenged conventional criteria for Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) formation and underscored the need for transport approaches capable of describing far-from-equilibrium dynamics. In this work, we employ heavy-flavor (HF) jet tomography to probe the short-lived medium created in proton-proton collisions at LHC energies. On an event-by-event basis, HF quark pairs produced in hard scattering via PYTHIA are embedded into a color string model and interact with the surrounding medium constituents through both elastic and inelastic collisions. By analyzing the momentum modifications of charm and bottom quarks, we find that momentum damping strongly depends on the degree of medium isotropization and is dominated by the radiative energy-loss mechanism. The resulting final-state HF hadron spectra are contrasted with predictions from equilibrated QGP models such as EPOS4HQ.
