Heavy flavor relaxation in a hadronic medium

Charm and bottom transport coefficients in a medium constituted of light mesons, such as is formed in the hadronic phase of heavy-ion collisions, are obtained within an effective field theory approach implementing heavy-quark symmetry and chiral symmetry breaking. Heavy flavor propagates in the medium as image and image degrees of freedom, and unitarization of the lowest order heavy–light meson amplitudes is used in order to reach high temperatures. The latter accounts for dynamically generated resonances in isospin 1/2 channels, a feature that leads to a more efficient heavy-flavor diffusion. We discuss the temperature and momentum dependence of the friction and diffusion coefficients in a transport approach up to temperatures of about image, and provide estimates of the charm/bottom relaxation lengths and momentum loss. Implications for heavy-meson spectrum observables in heavy-ion collisions are discussed.