Production of open charm and beauty states in pPb collisions with LHCb

Luciano Libero Pappalardo

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1137/1/012033

Abstract

A rich set of open heavy flavour states is observed by LHCb in pPb collisions data collected at 5 and 8.16 TeV nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy. Results include new measurements of production of beauty hadrons in pA collisions through cleanly reconstructed exclusive decays. Open charm states, including the baryon, were also observed in pA collisions for the first time by LHCb.

Highlights

A hot and dense medium of deconfined quarks and gluons, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), is known to be created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC
A rich set of open heavy flavour states is observed by LHCb in pP b collisions data collected at 5 and 8.16 TeV nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy
Heavy quarks are suitable probes to study the properties of QGP

Summary

Introduction

A hot and dense medium of deconfined quarks and gluons, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), is known to be created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. While propagating through the medium they interact with the medium constituents and lose energy through radiative gluonic emissions Studying these processes is of utmost importance for the understanding of the properties and the space-time evolution of the QGP. A correct interpretation of these phenomena in terms of QGP formation requires a full understanding of the cold nuclear-matter effects, which can be studied in processes where the QGP formation is traditionally not expected, such as in pP b collisions. These effects include energy-loss due to soft collisions, final-state hadronic rescattering and absorption, and modification of the nucleon PDFs (nuclear PDFs, nPDFs). The LHCb experiment can play a crucial role in these studies thanks to its high performances in heavy-flavour measurements and to the possibility to measure prompt heavy flavours at low pT and forward rapidity

The LHCb detector and the pP b datasets

Conclusions