Open heavy flavor in QCD matter and in nuclear collisions

We review the experimental and theoretical status of open heavy-flavor (HF) production in high-energy nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We first overview the theoretical concepts and pertinent calculations of HF transport in strong-interaction matter, including perturbative and non-perturbative approaches in quark–gluon plasma, effective models in hadronic matter, as well as implementations of heavy-quark (HQ) hadronization. This is followed by a brief discussion of bulk evolution models for heavy-ion collisions and initial conditions for the HQ distributions which are needed to calculate HF spectra in comparison to observables. We then turn to a discussion of experimental data that have been collected to date at RHIC and the LHC, specifically for the nuclear modification factor and elliptic flow of leptons from semileptonic HF decays, D mesons, non-prompt from B -meson decays, and b -jets. Model comparisons to HF data are conducted with regards to extracting the magnitude, temperature and momentum dependence of HF transport coefficients from experiment.