Speaker
Description
Heavy flavour (beauty and charm) quarks are of special interest for the study of the Quark-Gluon Plasma as they are predominantly produced in the initial hard-scattering processes and participate in the entire evolution of the system created in heavy-ion collisions. Thus, heavy flavours are an excellent probe to study in-medium energy loss (mechanisms) in nuclear collisions by measuring, for instance, the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ or the azimuthal anisotropy and especially the elliptic flow $v_2$ of heavy-flavour particles. Experimentally, heavy flavours are often investigated using measurements of electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays. These electrons can be separated statistically from the background originating from light flavours and gluons and provide insight into the colour charge (quark vs. gluon) and mass (charm vs. beauty) dependence of parton energy loss. In this poster, we present the relative contribution of electrons from beauty hadron decays to the yield of electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays estimated with Monte Carlo simulations based on POWHEG. The calculations are performed for p–p and Pb–Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV. Nuclear effects are taken into account using the nuclear parton distribution functions EPS09 and nCTEQ15. These calculations serve as an essential ingredient to separate the contributions of charm and beauty quarks in the measurements of the $p_T$-differential invariant cross section and elliptic flow of electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays.
| Preferred Track | Open Heavy Flavors |
|---|---|
| Collaboration | Not applicable |
