Speaker
Andrea Festanti
(Universita e INFN (IT))
Description
Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are considered effective probes to investigate the properties of the strongly-interacting medium formed in high energy nuclear collisions. Heavy quarks lose energy interacting with the medium via inelastic processes (medium-induced gluon radiation) and elastic collisions. The nuclear modification factor, $R_{\rm AA}$, defined as the ratio of the heavy-flavour production yield in nucleus-nucleus collisions to the binary scaled pp one, is an observable sensitive to in-medium energy loss. In particular, the comparison of the $R_{\rm AA}$ of charm, beauty and light-flavour hadrons provides information about the colour charge and parton mass dependence of the energy loss.
Open heavy-flavour production was measured with ALICE in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=2.76~\mathrm{TeV}$ using D mesons ($ {\rm D^0} $, ${\rm D^{*+}}$, $ {\rm D^{+}} $ and ${\rm D_s^+}$ ) reconstructed from their hadronic decays and electrons from heavy-flavour decays at central rapidity, and muons from heavy-flavour decays at forward rapidity. The D meson and heavy-flavour decay leptons differential $ R_{ \rm AA } $ measurements, namely the transverse momentum, rapidity and centrality dependence, will be shown. The comparison of the nuclear modification factors of strange and non-strange D mesons will be presented, as well as the ${\rm D^0}$ $R_{\rm AA}$ measured in different azimuthal regions with respect to the reaction plane of the collision. The D meson $R_{\rm AA}$ will be compared with light-flavour and non-prompt ${\rm J}/\psi$ results (from the CMS experiment). In addition, the heavy-flavour $R_{\rm AA}$ and $v_2$ will be compared to results from Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=200~\mathrm{GeV}$ measured at RHIC. Finally, the heavy-flavour measurements will be compared to theoretical models.
| On behalf of collaboration: | ALICE |
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Primary author
Andrea Festanti
(Universita e INFN (IT))
