Abstract

Heavy flavor (HF) quarks (charm, bottom) are important probes of the medium produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions because they are formed in the early stage and propagate throughout the lifetime of the system. HF-meson spectra and azimuthal anisotropy ( $v_2$ ) measurements have been reported by experiments at RHIC and the LHC, and they suggest strong interactions of HF quarks with the medium. $D^0$ -hadron correlations on relative pseudorapidity and azimuth ( $\Delta \eta ,\Delta \varphi$ ) provide a method for disentangling correlation structures on ( $\Delta \eta ,\Delta \varphi$ )—allowing for separation of structures related to jets and bulk phenomena directly, with the $D^0$ serving as a proxy for a charm jet. In these proceedings, we present 2D $D^0$ -hadron angular correlations as a function of centrality in Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV. These data reveal a jet-like, peaked structure at ( $\Delta \eta ,\Delta \varphi$ ) = (0, 0) (near-side), and a $\Delta \eta$ -independent azimuthal harmonic modulation. Here, we focus on the evolution of the near-side peak’s yield and widths on ( $\Delta \eta ,\Delta \varphi$ ) as a function of centrality and compare them to results from light flavor correlations.