Speaker
Description
Heavy-quark production in nuclear collisions is an important tool to access the properties and evolution of deconfined matter. Corresponding studies on pp collisions serve as a reference process, as well as a test of various aspects of QCD. A detection technique that was little explored until now at LHC energy is the analysis of the high-mass region of the dilepton invariant mass spectrum ($m>m_{J/\Psi}$), where a significant contribution comes from the semileptonic decay of pairs of charm and beauty hadrons.
A preliminary study is performed, where the Monte Carlo event generator PYTHIA8 is used to simulate pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=13 TeV, and the mass and transverse momentum spectra of muon pairs from heavy-flavour decays in the rapidity region 2.5<y<4 are obtained, separately for charm and beauty hadrons. This kinematic region corresponds to the coverage of the ALICE muon spectrometer. The goal of this study is a first comparison between the spectrum measured by ALICE in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=13 TeV, where the experiment has collected an integrated luminosity $\mathcal{L}_{int} \sim 25$ pb$^{-1}$, and the PYTHIA8 calculations.
In this poster, I will present the status of this analysis for what concerns the simulation chain and the prospects for the extraction of the heavy-quark cross sections from this study.
