Speaker
Mr
Jaime Norman
(University of Liverpool)
Description
Heavy quarks (charm and beauty), produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are formed in hard partonic scattering processes in the early stage of the collision, and therefore offer a unique opportunity to probe the properties of the strongly-interacting medium created. An interpretation of measurements in heavy-ion collisions requires measurements in pp and p-Pb collisions, which can themselves offer important information about heavy-flavour production.
The study of heavy-flavour production in pp collisions offers a baseline measurement to understand in-medium modification in Pb-Pb collisions as well as a test of pQCD predictions, and p-Pb measurements can give crucial information on cold nuclear matter effects, such as nuclear modification of parton distribution functions, $k_T$ broadening or energy loss in cold nuclear matter, as well as address the possibility of collective behaviour in smaller systems. More differential measurements can give further insight into heavy-flavour production. The measurement of D-meson yields as a function of multiplicity in pp and p-Pb collisions can offer unique insight into particle production mechanisms, including the interplay between hard and soft mechanisms, and the role of multi-parton interactions in heavy-flavour production. In addition the study of angular correlations between D-mesons and charged particles can give interesting insight into particle production mechanisms and jet properties.
The ALICE detector is well suited to measure charmed meson decays via hadronic channels and semi-leptonic heavy-flavour decays. This talk will give an overview of heavy-flavour measurements made with the ALICE detector during Run 1 in pp and p-Pb collisions, as well as outline current and future measurements for Run 2.
Primary author
Mr
Jaime Norman
(University of Liverpool)
