Probing parton thermalization time with charm production

Abstract
Preequilibrium parton scattering is shown to make an important contribution to the charm production in relativistic heavy ion collisions. In contrast to the gluon shadowing effect in the initial parton scattering, the enhancement of the final total open charm in the central region due to preequilibrium production could be used as a measure of the thermalization time of the dense partonic system.