Experimental overview on heavy-flavor production

Abstract

Hadrons containing heavy-flavors are unique probes of the properties of the hot and dense QCD medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. Due to their large masses, heavy quarks are produced at the initial stage of the collision, almost exclusively via hard partonic scattering processes. Therefore, they are expected to experience the full collision history propagating through and interacting with the QCD medium. The parton energy loss, which is sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced medium, can be studied experimentally by measuring the nuclear modification factor which accounts for the modification of the heavy–flavored hadron yield in Pb–Pb collisions with respect to pp collisions. In semi-central Pb–Pb collisions, the degree of thermalization of charm quarks in the QCD medium can be accessed via the measurement of the heavy flavor elliptic flow v2 at low pT. Furthermore, the measurement of heavy-flavors production in pp collisions allows testing the perturbative QCD calculations. The PHENIX and STAR Collaborations at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and ALICE, CMS and ATLAS Collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider have measured the production of charmonium and bottonium states as well as open heavy flavor hadrons via their hadronic and semi-leptonic decays at mid-rapidity and in the semi-muonic decay channel at forward rapidity in pp, p-A and A–A collisions in an energy domain that ranges from = 0.2 TeV to = 13 TeV in pp collisions and from = 0.2 TeV to = 5.02 TeV in A–A collisions. In this contribution the latest experimental results will be reviewed.