Speaker
Annelies Marianne Veen
(Nikhef National institute for subatomic physics (NL))
Description
The measurement of open heavy-flavour production is a powerful tool to test next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculations in hadronic collisions in the TeV energy regime of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Moreover, the D$^{\star +}$-meson $p_{\rm T}$-differential production cross section in pp collisions provides the reference for the study of nuclear matter effects on ${\rm D}^{\star +}$-meson yields in Pb--Pb collisions, as quantified by the nuclear modification factor ($R_{\rm AA}$). This observable compares the measured particle yield in Pb--Pb collisions with the yield in binary-scaled pp collisions. As heavy-flavour quarks (charm and beauty) are primarily produced in hard scattering processes in the early stage of collisions, they provide excellent probes for the Quark-Gluon Plasma produced in Pb--Pb collisions.
The ALICE detector at the LHC collected data in pp collisions at center-of-mass energies of 2.76, 7, 8 TeV and, starting from June 2015, at 13 TeV, as well as in Pb--Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV and in p--Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV.
In ALICE, $\rm{D}^{*+}$ mesons are reconstructed at mid-rapidity via the $\rm{D}^{\star +} \rightarrow \rm{D}^0$ $\pi^+$ $\rightarrow \rm{K}^-$ $\pi^+$ $\pi^+$ decay channel.
In this contribution, we present the latest results on the $\rm{D}^{\star +}$-meson nuclear modification factor in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}}= 2.76$ TeV as well as discuss prospects for $\rm{D}^{\star +}$-meson measurements in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using the LHC run-2 data.
| On behalf of collaboration: | ALICE |
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Primary author
Annelies Marianne Veen
(Nikhef National institute for subatomic physics (NL))
