Measurement of heavy-flavor production in Pb—Pb collisions at the LHC with ALICE

Abstract

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been built in order to study the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) created in high-energy nuclear collisions. As heavy-flavor quarks are produced at the early stage of the collision, they serve as sensitive probes for the QGP. The ALICE detector with its capabilities such as particle identification, secondary vertexing and tracking in a high multiplicity environment can address, among other measurements, the heavy-flavor sector in heavy-ion collisions.We present latest results on the measurement of the nuclear modification factor of open heavy-flavors as well as on the measurement of open heavy-flavor azimuthal anisotropy v2 in Pb-Pb collisions at TeV.Open charmed hadrons are reconstructed in the hadronic decay channels D° K−−π+, D+ K−−π+π+, and D*+ D0π+ applying a secondary decay-vertex topology. Complementary measurements are performed by detecting electrons (muons) from semi-leptonic decays of open heavy-flavor hadrons in the central (forward) rapidity region.