Speaker
Andre Mischke
(Utrecht University)
Description
Strongly interacting matter at high densities and temperatures can be created and carefully studied under laboratory conditions in high-energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei. Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) provide particular good probes to study the so-called Quark-Gluon Plasma state and its evolution since they are predominantly produced in initial hard partonic scattering processes in the early stages of the collision.
Since 2010 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN delivers lead-lead collisions at an unprecedented energy in the TeV range. The measurement of open heavy-flavour production in heavy-ion collisions allows studies of the dynamical properties of the plasma phase.
The ALICE experiment has measured charm and beauty production in Pb-Pb collisions at
$\sqrt{\rm s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV and 5.02 TeV, via the exclusive reconstruction of hadronic D-meson decays and semi-leptonic D and B-meson decays.
In this contribution, I will give an overview of current open heavy-flavour results from ALICE ranging from the nuclear modification factor to elliptic flow measurements and of the interpretation of the data by comparing with different model calculations of in-medium energy loss.
Primary author
Andre Mischke
(Utrecht University)
