Heavy-Flavor Physics at PHENIX, R. Noucier for the PHENIX Collaboration, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA − Hadrons carrying heavy quarks, i.e. charm or bottom, are important probes of the hot and dense medium created in relativistic heavy ion collisions.  Heavy quark-antiquark pairs are mainly produced in initial hard scattering processes of partons.  While some of the produced pairs form bound quarkonia, the vast majority hadronize into particles carrying open heavy flavor.  Heavy quark production has been studied by the PHENIX experiment at RHIC via measurements of single leptons from semi-leptonic decays in both the electron channel at mid-rapidity and in the muon channel at forward rapidity.  A large suppression and azimuthal anisotropy of single electrons have been observed in Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV.  These results suggest a large energy loss and flow of heavy quarks in the hot, dense matter.  The PHENIX experiment has also measured J/Psi production at 200 GeV in p+p, d+Au, Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions, both at mid- and forward-rapidities.  In the most energetic collisions (central Au+Au), more suppression is observed at forward rapidity than at central rapidity.  This can be interpreted either as a sign of quark recombination, or as a hint of additional cold nuclear matter effects.

This talk summarizes the latest PHENIX results concerning open and closed heavy quark production as a function of energy and systems size, and their interpretation in view of the current theoretical understanding on this topic.