Transport properties of bottomed mesons in a hot mesonic gas

In this work we evaluate the B-meson drag and diffusion coefficients in a hot medium constituted of light mesons (pi, K, (K) over bar, and eta). We treat the B-meson and B*-meson interactions with pseudo-Goldstone bosons in chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order within the constraints from heavy quark symmetry and employ standard unitarization techniques of next-to-leading order amplitudes in order to account for dynamically generated resonances (leading to a more efficient heavy-flavor diffusion) and thus reach higher temperatures. We estimate individual meson contributions from the gas to the transport coefficients and perform a comparison with other findings in literature. We report a bottom relaxation length of about 80 fm at a temperature of 150 MeV and for typical momenta of 1 GeV, at which our approach is reliable. Compared to a charm relaxation length of 40 fm in the same conditions, we conclude that the B mesons provide a cleaner probe of the early stages of a heavy-ion collision. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.87.034019