Speaker
Description
Heavy quarks are effective probes to investigate the quark--gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy-ion collisions since they are primarily produced in hard-scattering processes before the formation of the QGP.
Therefore, measurements of heavy-flavour hadron production in nucleus--nucleus collisions are crucial to investigate the mechanisms of interaction of heavy quarks inside the QGP and test the predictions of in-medium energy loss calculations. In addition, they provide unique experimental capabilities to study the properties of heavy-quark hadronization in hadronic collisions.
In this contribution, we present the nuclear modification factors ($R_\mathrm{AA}$) of charm mesons and baryons, non-prompt strange and non-strange D mesons and heavy-flavour hadron decaying to leptons measured in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}=5.02$~TeV by the ALICE Collaboration.
In addition, the measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of prompt and non-prompt D mesons is discussed. The second harmonic coefficient helps to investigate the degree of thermalization of charm and beauty quark in the hot and dense QCD medium. A systematic comparison of experimental measurements with model calculations will be presented to disentangle different model contributions and provide significant constraints to the QGP's charm-quark diffusion coefficient $D_s$.
