Abstract
Heavy-flavor quarks (i.e. charm and beauty) are essential probes to investigate the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The measurement of the nuclear modification factor (RAA) gives insight into the in-medium parton energy loss in heavy-ion collisions. Furthermore, the measurements of heavy-flavor elliptic flow (v2) provide crucial information about the degree of thermalization of heavy quarks in the QGP, the path-length dependence of heavy-quark in-medium energy loss, and possible recombination effects. The higher flow harmonics, such as the triangular flow (v3), provide further constraints on the effect of fluctuations in the initial state of the system. The measurements in proton-proton (pp) collisions allow for testing perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations and are needed as a baseline for investigating the medium effects in heavy-ion collisions. In this contribution, recent results of open charm and beauty production measured with the ALICE detector are discussed.
Highlights
IntroductionThe ALICE apparatus was designed to study the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter in which colored-partons are deconfined
The ALICE apparatus was designed to study the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter in which colored-partons are deconfined. Due to their large mass, heavy quarks are mainly produced in initial hard-scattering processes, which occur before the QGP formation [1]
The measurements are found to be compatible with FONLL [8,9,10] and NNLO [11] calculations. This result provides an important test for perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations in the beauty sector at the LHC
Summary
The ALICE apparatus was designed to study the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter in which colored-partons are deconfined Due to their large mass, heavy quarks are mainly produced in initial hard-scattering processes, which occur before the QGP formation [1]. They interact with the medium during the full evolution of the system. Non-prompt D mesons are used to measure open-beauty hadron production. Open heavy-flavor production is measured by identifying the electrons from semi-electronic decays of charm and beauty hadrons. The production yield is extracted by subtracting the contamination of hadrons and of non-heavy flavor decay electrons from the inclusive sample. The production of beauty-hadron decay electrons is measured by determining statistically the fraction of beauty-decay electrons in the inclusive electron sample with an impact-parameter template fit method [5, 6]
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