11th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

We show that the same QCD formalism that accounts for the suppression of high-$p_T$ hadron and jet spectra in heavy-ion collisions predicts medium-enhanced production of $c\bar{c}$ pairs in jets. Using the formalism of Baier-Dokshitzer-Mueller-Peigné-Schiff and Zakharov we compute the medium-modifications of the gluon splitting into a quark–anti-quark pair and reveal two phenomena: a medium-induced momentum broadening of quark–antiquark pairs, and a medium-enhanced production of such pairs. We perform a parton shower study to demonstrate that the medium-enhanced production of $ c\bar{c}$ pairs leads to enhanced production of jets containing $D^0 \bar{D}^0$. We estimate that this novel effect of jet-medium interaction could be measurable in high-luminosity heavy-ion runs at the LHC.