Using Heavy Quarks to Study the Primordial Liquid

Produced in the earliest hard scatterings and approximately conserved throughout the subsequent evolution, they are sensitive to the medium over a wide range of momentum scales. At the same time, describing their dynamics in a unified way remains a major theoretical and phenomenological challenge, since one must connect ultra-relativistic energy loss to the late time Brownian-like motion of almost thermalised heavy quarks within a single framework.

In this talk I will present our recent extension of the hybrid strong/weak-coupling model of jet quenching to heavy flavour, including momentum broadening and in-medium hadronisation, and explain how it captures the relevant physics across these regimes. I will discuss the underlying transport picture, the theoretical issues that arise in matching the different dynamical limits, and the implications for heavy-flavour observables and for our broader understanding of heavy-quark transport in QCD matter. I will also touch on recent theoretical and ongoing phenomenological work on the effects of non-Gaussianities in the distribution of momentum transfers on our understanding of quark-gluon plasma.