Heavy mesons in a hadronic medium: interaction and transport coefficients

We review the recent results of heavy meson diffusion in thermal hadronic matter. The interactions of D and B-bar mesons with other hadrons (light mesons and baryons) are extracted from effective field theories based on chiral and heavy-quark symmetries. When these guiding principles are combined with exact unitarity, physical values of the cross sections are obtained. These cross sections (which contain resonant contributions) are used to calculate the drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy mesons immersed in a thermal and dense medium. The transport coefficients are computed using a Fokker-Planck reduction of the Boltzmann equation.