Speaker
Loic Henri Antoine Manceau
(Universita e INFN (IT))
Description
ALICE is the LHC experiment dedicated to the study of heavy ion collisions where
extreme thermodynamical conditions are supposed to lead to the creation of a deconfined
QCD state of matter called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Amongst the prominent probes
of the QGP, heavy quarks are of special interest since they are produced in the initial
parton-parton interactions of A-A collisions and interact with the medium throughout
its evolution. In particular, the study of quarkonium (bound states of heavy quark anti-
quark pairs) production is expected to provide essential information on QGP properties.
Dissociation of quarkonia should occur in the medium and the dissociation rate for a given
quarkonium state should depend on the medium temperature. A sequential suppression
of the measured quarkonium yield should then be observed. However, several additional
effects are to be taken into account in the interpretation of the results. Quarkonia can be
regenerated in the medium and this effect should be much larger for charmonia (bound
states of ccbar pairs) than for bottomonia (bound states of bbar pairs). In addition, Cold
Nuclear Matter (CNM) effects (such as shadowing, anti-shadowing and break up or energy
loss) must also be separated from effects due to the QGP formation. The CNM effects can
be quantified by studying the quarkonium production in p-A collisions where the QGP
is not expected to be created. Finally, quarkonium yield measurements in pp collisions
provide stringent tests to hadroproduction models and benchmarks for p-A and A-A
collision studies.
In ALICE, the measurement of quarkonia can be performed with the forward spectrometer (−4 ≤ η ≤ −2.5) and the central barrel (−0.9 ≤ η ≤ 0.9) via the di-muonic and
the di-electronic decay channel, respectively. Recent results on quarkonium production
in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at the TeV scale will be reported.
Author
Loic Henri Antoine Manceau
(Universita e INFN (IT))