Can One Discriminate the Thermal Dilepton Signal Against the Open Charm and Bottom Decay Background in Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions?

Abstract
In ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at √s > 20 (120) A GeV a copious production of charm (bottom) production sets in which, via correlated semileptonic DD (BB) decays, gives rise to a dilepton yield at invariant mass M ≈ 2 - 3 GeV in excess of the Drell-Yan yield and the thermal dilepton signal from deconfined matter as well. We show that appropriate single-electron transverse momentum cuts (suitable for ALICE at LHC) cause a threshold like behavior of the dilepton spectra from heavy-quark meson decays and the Drell-Yan process and can allow to observe a thermal dilepton signal from hot deconfined matter.