Studies of Heavy Flavor Jets Using $D^0$-hadron Correlations in Azimuth and Pseudorapidity in Au+Au Collisions at 200 GeV at the STAR Experiment

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 QGP medium. 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 ($\mathrm{\Delta }\eta ,\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi$) provide a method for disentangling correlation structures on ($\mathrm{\Delta }\eta ,\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi$), 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 ($\mathrm{\Delta }\eta ,\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi$) = (0, 0) (near-side), and a $\mathrm{\Delta }\eta$-independent azimuthal harmonic modulation. Here, we focus on the evolution of the near-side peak’s yield and widths on ($\mathrm{\Delta }\eta ,\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi$) as a function of centrality and compare them to results from light flavor correlations with a similar trigger mean-$p_T$.