D-mesons in asymmetric nuclear matter

Amruta Mishra, Arindam Mazumdar

Published 2008-10-17, updated 2009-02-23Version 3

We calculate the in-medium $D$ and $\bar D$-meson masses in isospin asymmetric nuclear matter in an effective chiral model. The $D$ and $\bar D$ - mass modifications arising from their interactions with the nucleons and the scalar mesons in the effective hadronic model are seen to be appreciable at high densities and have a strong isospin dependence. These mass modifications can open the channels of the decay of the charmonium states ($\Psi^\prime$, $\chi_c$, $J/\Psi$) to $D \bar D$ pairs in the dense hadronic matter. The isospin asymmetry in the doublet $D=(D^0,D^+)$ is seen to be particularly appreciable at high densities and should show in observables like their production and flow in asymmetric heavy ion collisions in the compressed baryonic matter experiments in the future facility of FAIR, GSI. The results of the present work are compared to calculations of the $D(\bar D$) in-medium masses in the literature using the QCD sum rule approach, quark meson coupling model, coupled channel approach as well as from the studies of quarkonium dissociation using heavy quark potentials from lattice QCD at finite temperatures.