Speaker
Dr
Deepa Thomas
(ALICE Collaboration)
Description
In hadronic collisions, heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are produced in hard scattering processes with large momentum transfer. The measurement of the production cross sections of heavy-flavour hadrons in pp collisions provides an important test of pQCD calculations. Some insight into the role of multi-parton interactions (MPI) and the interplay between hard and soft mechanism for particle production can be obtained by studying heavy-flavour production as a function of multiplicity of charged particles produced in these collisions. The measurement in pp collisions also provides a crucial baseline for heavy-ion collisions.
In p-Pb collisions, heavy-quark production is expected to be sensitive to cold nuclear matter effects, such as the modification of parton distribution functions in nuclei compared to nucleons and $k_{\rm{T}}$ broadening or energy loss in cold nuclear matter. To better understand the relation between cold nuclear matter effects and the number of particles produced in the collision, heavy-flavour production can be studied as a function of charged-particle multiplicity.
With the ALICE detector at the LHC, heavy-flavour production is studied by reconstructing $\rm{D}^{0}$, $\rm{D}^{+}$, $\rm{D}^{*+}$ and $\rm{D}^{+}_{\rm{s}}$ mesons via their hadronic decay channels and, alternatively, via the measurement of leptons (electrons and muons) from semi-leptonic decays of heavy-flavour hadrons.
In this contribution, we present results on open heavy-flavour production cross sections and their dependence on charged particle multiplicity in pp ($\sqrt{s}=2.76$ TeV and $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV) and p-Pb collisions ($\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV). We also present azimuthal correlations of D mesons and heavy-flavour decay electrons with charged hadrons in pp and p-Pb collisions.
Primary author
Dr
Deepa Thomas
(ALICE Collaboration)
