Speaker
Description
The LHC heavy-ion physics program aims at investigating the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) formed in such collisions. Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are regarded as efficient probes to study and characterize the QGP, as they are created on a very short time scale in initial hard processes and subsequently experience the entire system evolution interacting with the medium constituents.
The measurement of the nuclear modification factor, $R_{\rm AA}$, of heavy-flavour particles gives important information about the colour-charge and parton-mass dependence of the energy loss as well as about possible modifications of heavy-quark hadronization in the medium. The heavy-flavour elliptic flow, $v_{2}$, provides insights on the degree of thermalization of heavy quarks in the medium at low $p_{\rm T}$ and the path-length dependence of parton energy loss at high $p_{\rm T}$, respectively. In addition, the study of heavy-flavour jets gives more direct access to the initial parton kinematics and can provide further constraints for heavy-quark energy loss mechanisms, in particular concerning the dissipation of the radiated energy in the medium.
In this talk, the latest results on the $p_{\rm T}$-differential $R_{\rm AA}$ and $v_{2}$ of non-strange D mesons in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$ TeV performed with ALICE will be presented for different centrality classes and compared with theoretical model predictions. The results obtained with the Event-Shape Engineering (ESE) technique applied to the D-meson elliptic flow in semi-central Pb--Pb events to investigate the influence of initial geometry fluctuations on heavy-flavour production will be shown. Finally, the measurements of D-tagged jets in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$~TeV will be discussed.
