Turning on the charm

We argue that the strong jet quenching of heavy flavors observed in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate momenta is to a large extent due to binary scatterings in the quark–gluon plasma. To arrive at this conclusion we improve existing approaches in two aspects: We calculate the charm collision probability beyond leading logarithmic accuracy, taking into account the momentum dependence of the strong coupling. This scattering probability distribution then provides the basis of a consistent transport description of heavy flavors, formulating their evolution as a Markov process.