Soft open charm production in Heavy-Ion Collisions

The effects of strong longitudinal color electric fields on the open charm production in nucleus-nucleus (A+A) collisions at 200A GeV are investigated within the framework of the HIJING/BB[over ] v2.0 model. A threefold increase of the effective string tension due to in-medium effects in A+A collisions results in a sizable ( approximately 60%-70%) enhancement of the total charm production cross sections (sigma (cc)(NN)). The nuclear modification factor shows a suppression at moderate transverse momentum (p(T)) consistent with BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider data. At Large Hadron Collider energies the model predicts an increase of sigma (cc)(NN) by approximately an order of magnitude.