D-Meson Production via Sequential Hadronization in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

Heavy flavor production serves as an ideal probe of the hadronization mechanism of the quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We study charm-quark hadronization using Langevin transport in the medium together with a sequential coalescence model. Since D_{s} forms earlier than D^{0}, as obtained from the Dirac equation with an in-medium potential extracted from lattice QCD, the D_{s} elliptic flow v_{2} is smaller than the D^{0} v_{2} in the intermediate-p_{T} region, in good agreement with the recent ALICE data. Incorporating sequential coalescence, charm-quark number conservation, and strangeness enhancement predicts a peak in the yield ratio D_{s}/D^{0} at low p_{T}, which can be tested in future heavy-ion collisions.