Recent Findings from Heavy-Flavor Angular Correlation Measurements in Hadronic Collisions

Abstract

The study of angular correlations of heavy-flavor particles in hadronic collisions can provide crucial insight into the heavy quark production, showering, and hadronization processes. The comparison with model predictions allows us to discriminate among different approaches for heavy quark production and hadronization, as well as different treatments of the underlying event employed by the models to reproduce correlation observables. In ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where a deconfined state of matter, the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), is created, heavy-flavor correlations can shed light on the modification of the heavy quark fragmentation due to the interaction between charm and beauty quarks with the QGP constituents, as well as characterize their energy loss processes while traversing the medium. Insight into the possible emergence of collective-like mechanisms in smaller systems, resembling those observed in heavy-ion collisions, can also be obtained by performing correlation studies in high-multiplicity proton–proton and proton–nucleus collisions. In this review, the most recent and relevant measurements of heavy-flavor correlations performed in all collision systems at the LHC and RHIC will be presented, and the new understandings that they provide will be discussed.