Speaker
Description
Heavy flavours (charm and beauty) and electroweak bosons (W and Z) are produced in initial hard partonic scatterings. The former interact strongly with the medium formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions throughout its evolution, thus making them well suited to investigate its properties. Furthermore, heavy-flavour measurements in proton-nucleus collisions can be used to investigate initial-state effects whereas in proton-proton (pp) collisions they are considered an important test for perturbative Quantum ChromoDynamics (pQCD) predictions. In addition, the open heavy-flavour measurements in pp collisions are used as a reference for proton-lead (p--Pb) and lead-lead (Pb--Pb) collisions.
On the other hand, electroweak bosons and their leptonic decay products only interact weakly with the QCD matter and thus are suitable probes to test the validity of binary-collision scaling of hard processes. Moreover, their measurements in p--Pb collisions could help to constrain nuclear parton distribution functions.
The ALICE muon spectrometer allows the measurement of open heavy flavour, W- and Z-boson production at forward rapidity (-4.0$<\eta<$-2.5) exploiting their (di)muonic decay channel. In this talk the results obtained with the LHC Run I data in pp, p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions will be discussed and compared with theoretical predictions.
