Speaker
Dr
Jeremy Wilkinson
(Università e INFN Bologna)
Description
The production of heavy quarks (charm and beauty) in collider experiments occurs primarily due to hard scattering processes in the initial stages of a collision, and not through thermal processes at later stages. This property makes them an excellent probe to study the evolution of the strongly interacting medium produced in central Pb--Pb collisions at the LHC. Proton--proton collisions serve as a crucial baseline, allowing the modification of particle spectra in nuclear collisions to be studied. Furthermore, comparisons between proton--lead and lead--lead collisions allow initial-state nuclear effects to be disentangled from final-state effects in the medium, which is necessary to properly interpret the Pb--Pb results. In addition, the production of heavy-flavour particles can be measured as a function of the multiplicity of charged particles produced in the collision in order to more closely examine particle production mechanisms and determine the influence of multi-parton interactions on heavy-flavour production.
Thanks to its excellent tracking and particle identification capabilities, the ALICE detector at the CERN LHC is well suited to the study of open heavy-flavour particles via the reconstruction of the decays of D mesons and $\Lambda_\mathrm{c}$ baryons to hadronic final states at mid-rapidity, and the semileptonic decays of charm and beauty hadrons (including the $\Xi_\mathrm{c}$ baryon) to electrons at mid-rapidity, and to muons at forward/backward rapidity. This talk will present a review of the main ALICE results on open heavy-flavour production in pp, p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions in Run 1 and Run 2 of the LHC, with an outlook towards future prospects in this field.
Primary author
Dr
Jeremy Wilkinson
(Università e INFN Bologna)
