Speaker
Yvonne Chiara Pachmayer
(Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet Heidelberg (DE))
Description
In high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, heavy-flavour quarks,
i. e. charm and beauty, are produced on a very short time scale in
initial hard scattering processes and thus they experience the whole
history of the collision. Therefore, they are valuable probes to study
the mechanisms of energy loss and hadronisation in the hot and dense
state of matter, that is expected to be formed in the collision. In order
to investigate these medium effects proton-proton (pp) and proton-nucleus (p-A)
collisions are measured as reference. While the first collision system
allows one to test pQCD calculations and to establish the reference for Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions,
the latter gives access to cold nuclear matter effects, e. g. parton scattering
in the initial state and modifications of the parton densities in the nucleus.
Heavy-flavour production can be measured in hadronic and semi-leptonic
decay channels with ALICE at the LHC. However heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are
rare probes, which makes differential and detailed studies difficult.
At mid-rapidity, the ALICE Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) can be used to select events
with electrons at trigger level, to significantly enrich samples of electrons
originating from open heavy-flavour and quarkonia decays. The TRD electron trigger
was successfully in use in p-Pb collisions at
| On behalf of collaboration: | ALICE |
|---|
Author
Yvonne Chiara Pachmayer
(Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet Heidelberg (DE))
