Speaker
Per-Ivar Lonne
(University of Bergen (NO))
Description
In collisions of lead nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a state of matter called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is predicted to be formed, where quarks and gluons are no longer confined into hadrons. Heavy-flavour quarks, i.e., charm and beauty, are effective probes for studying the QGP, as their relatively large mass limits their production predominantly, if not exclusively, to hard scattering processes in the very first moments of the collisions, before the QGP formation. As the quarks propagate through the hot and dense medium created in the Pb-Pb collisions they interact with the medium and lose energy via elastic collisions and gluon radiation.
The study of the modification of the angular correlation between D mesons and charged hadrons, as well as the correlation between D mesons and electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in Pb-Pb collisions with respect to pp and p-Pb collisions can provide relevant information on the energy-loss mechanism. This applies in particular to the dependence of the correlation on the path length traversed by the charm quark in the medium, and to possible medium modifications of charm-quark fragmentation and hadronisation. In pp collisions, these measurements can be sensitive to the different production processes of heavy-flavour quarks, e.g., pair production vs. gluon splitting. In this poster, the results of the analysis of azimuthal correlations between D mesons and charged hadrons in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV and p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 5.02$ TeV will be presented. In addition, the prospects for measuring correlations of D mesons and electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays will be discussed. The performance expected after the upgrade of the ALICE detector during the long shutdown in 2018 will also be shown.
| On behalf of collaboration: | ALICE |
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Primary author
Per-Ivar Lonne
(University of Bergen (NO))
