Thermal relaxation of charm in hadronic matter

The thermal relaxation rate of open-charm (D) mesons in hot and dense hadronic matter is calculated using empirical elastic scattering amplitudes. D-meson interactions with thermal pions are approximated by D^? resonances, while scattering off other hadrons (K, η, ρ, ω, K^?, N, Δ) is evaluated using vacuum scattering amplitudes as available in the literature based on effective Lagrangians and constrained by realistic spectroscopy. The thermal relaxation time of D-mesons in a hot π gas is found to be around 25-50 fm/c for temperatures T=150-180 MeV, which reduces to 10-25 fm/c in a hadron-resonance gas. The latter values, argued to be conservative estimates, imply significant modifications of D-meson spectra in heavy-ion collisions. Close to the critical temperature (Tc), the spatial diffusion coefficient (Ds) is surprisingly similar to recent calculations for charm quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma using non-perturbative T-matrix interactions. This suggests a possibly continuous minimum structure of Ds around Tc.