Speaker
Description
Ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions provide a unique environment for studying strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions and the formation of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). The collision begins from a highly non-equilibrium initial state, where strong gluonic fields may be present during the pre-equilibrium glasma stage. Since heavy quarks are produced predominantly at very early times, their correlations can retain information about their initial production and subsequent interactions with the evolving medium. Recent studies suggest that low-(p_T) (\mathrm{D^0}-\mathrm{ \bar D^0}) azimuthal correlations show sensitivity to the early stages of heavy-ion collisions. However, previous studies employ simplified collision geometries, focusing on central and boost-invariant systems, rather than incorporating realistic event-by-event fluctuations and the complete evolution from the initial state to the final hadronic state.
In this work, we investigate (\mathrm{D^0}-\mathrm{ \bar D^0}) correlations within the JETSCAPE framework using the relative azimuthal angle, (\Delta\phi), for different trigger- and associated-particle (p_T) intervals. By employing TRENTo and IP-Glasma within JETSCAPE, we go beyond the simplified initial-state treatments of previous studies by incorporating realistic event-by-event fluctuations and following their influence through the subsequent evolution to the final-state (\mathrm{D}^0!-!\bar{\mathrm{D}}^0) correlations. We compare the resulting correlation patterns across the different initial-state descriptions to identify their imprints on final-state heavy-flavour observables.