STRANGENESS, CHARM, AND BOTTOM PRODUCTION FROM DENSE PARTON MATTER IN HIGH-ENERGY NUCLEAR COLLISIONS

The production properties of strange, charm, and bottom quarks in ultrarelativistic A + A collisions at heavy ion colliders are investigated for systems from p + p to Au + Au in the energy range square-root s/A = 200-6300 GeV, using the parton cascade model. Within this kinetic space-time description of the parton dynamics, based on the current understanding of semihard and hard QCD interactions, it is found that a substantial enhancement of s, c, and b production can be expected in AA collisions with plasma formation of the deconfined parton matter relative to the case of a purely hadronic scenario without plasma formation. Because of the large number of initially produced energetic gluons the main contribution comes from decays of virtually excited gluons and gluon fusion. The associated resonance production of phi, J/psi, and UPSILON is estimated and it is shown that the resulting abundances of these vector mesons can be used as a sensitive thermometer of the hot and dense QCD matter formed in the central region during the very early stage of the collisions. Therefore the future heavy ion collider experiments would have an attractive opportunity to probe the evolution of partons through preequilibrium toward plasma formation by measuring the multiplicities and momentum spectra of heavy mesons.