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 $\sqrt{s} >$ 20 (120) A$\cdot$GeV a copious production of charm (bottom) production sets in which, via correlated semileptonic $D \bar D$ ($B \bar B$) decays, gives rise to a dilepton yield at invariant mass $M \approx$ 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.