THERMAL DILEPTON SIGNAL VERSUS DILEPTONS FROM OPEN CHARM AND BOTTOM DECAYS IN HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS

We analyze the opportunity to observe thermal dileptons emitted off de confined matter resulting in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC ener gies. Special kinematical conditions provided by the detector systems PHENIX and ALICE, and the so-called M-perpendicular to, scaling behavi or of thermal dilepton spectra are taken into account. Our considerati ons include energy loss effects of the fast heavy quarks in deconfined matter, which for themselves can help to identify the creation of a h ot and dense parton medium. Due to a thresholdlike effect for decay le ptons we find a window at large transverse pair momentum and fixed tra nsverse mass where the thermal signal can exceed the background of dil eptons from correlated semileptonic decays of charm and bottom mesons.