CAN DILEPTONS BE OBSERVED IN HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS AT RELATIVISTIC HEAVY-ION COLLIDER ENERGIES

Both dilepton and charm production at RHIC are considered to be import ant signatures for quark-gluon plasma production. Recently it was argu ed by Gavin et al. that the background from semileptonic correlated ch arm decays is so large that it makes dilepton measurements virtually i mpossible. We show that this conclusion is in fact reversed if the ene rgy loss due to a secondary interaction of charmed quarks is included.