Hadronization of heavy quarks

Heavy -flavor hadrons produced in ultrarelativistic heavy -ion collisions are a sensitive probe for studying hadronization mechanisms of the quark -gluon -plasma. In this paper, we survey how different transport models for the simulation of heavy -quark diffusion through a quark -gluon plasma in heavy -ion collisions implement hadronization and how this affects final state observables. Utilizing the same input charm -quark distribution in all models at the hadronization transition, we find that the transverse -momentum dependence of the nuclear modification factor of various charm hadron species has significant sensitivity to the hadronization scheme. In addition, the charm-hadron elliptic flow exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the elliptic flow of the hadronizing partonic medium.