Speaker
Minjung Kim
(Inha University (KR))
Description
Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are essential probes of the evolution of the medium created in heavy-ion collisions, because heavy-quark production in high-energy collisions occurs early compared to the formation time of the strongly-interacting partonic matter. To quantify medium effects in AA collisions, one needs to study pp collisions and p$-$A collisions as references. Apart from providing the crucial reference for Pb$-$Pb collisions, the measurements of heavy-flavour production in pp collisions provide tests for perturbative QCD calculations. Measurements in p$-$A collisions can be used to study cold nuclear matter effects, such as modifications to the parton densities in nuclei, $k_{T}$ broadening and energy loss in cold nuclear matter. The ALICE detector is dedicated to the study of the strongly- interacting partonic medium, produced in heavy-ion collisions. Thanks to excellent tracking, vertexing and particle$-$identification capabilities provided by ALICE, we have been able to measure electrons (muons) from semileptonic heavy-flavour hadron decays at mid (forward/ backward) rapidity. Electrons are reconstructed and identified using several detectors at mid rapidity ($< |\eta| <$ < 0.9), namely the Time Of Flight detector, the Time Projection Chamber, the Electromagnetic Calorimeter, and the Transition Radiation Detector. Muons are reconstructed using the muon spectrometer at forward rapidity (2.5 $< \eta <$ 4). In this talk, we present measurements of electrons and muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays at mid and forward rapidity with ALICE in pp ($\sqrt{s}$ = 2.76 TeV and $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV), p$-$Pb ($\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV) and Pb$-$Pb collisions ($\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV). The measurements of production cross sections of leptons from heavy-flavour decays in pp, p$-$Pb and Pb$-$Pb collisions, the nuclear modification factor in p$-$Pb and Pb$-$Pb collisions and the azimuthal anisotropy in Pb$-$Pb collisions will be presented with theoretical model comparisons.
Authors
Minjung Kim
(Inha University (KR))
for the ALICE Collaboration
