Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We study the nuclear modification of angular and momentum correlations between heavy quark pairs in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The evolution of heavy quarks inside the thermalized medium is described via a modified Langevin approach that incorporates both elastic and inelastic interactions with the medium constituents. The spacetime evolution of the fireball is obtained from a (2+1)-dimensional viscous hydrodynamics simulation. The hadronization of heavy quarks is performed by utilizing a hybrid model of fragmentation and coalescence. Our results show that the nuclear modification of the transverse momentum imbalance of DD¯ pairs reflects the total energy loss experienced by the heavy quarks and may help us probe specific regions of the medium. The angular correlation of heavy-flavor pairs, especially in the low- to intermediate-transverse-momentum regime, is sensitive to the detailed energy-loss mechanism of heavy quarks inside the quark-gluon plasma.