Speakers
Description
The production of heavy quarks (charm and beauty) in heavy-ion collisions occurs via hard partonic scattering processes at early times. Thus they represent a unique probe of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), as they interact with the system throughout its entire lifetime. The heavy-flavour nuclear modification factor ($R_{\rm AA}$) and elliptic flow ($v_{\rm 2}$) are two of the main experimental observables that allow us to investigate the interaction strength of heavy quarks with the expanding medium. The $R_{\rm AA}$ measurements provide information about the modification of heavy-flavour hadron yields in heavy-ion collisions with respect to pp collisions, after the proper binary NN collision scaling is applied on the latter system. The comparison of the $R_{\rm AA}$ of charm, beauty and light-flavour hadrons can provide information about the colour-charge and parton-mass dependence of the parton energy loss.
High precision $v_{\rm 2}$ measurements of heavy-flavour particles provide stringent information about the thermal degrees of freedom of heavy quarks in the QGP, path-length dependence of heavyquark in-medium energy loss and recombination effects. In this contribution, prompt and non prompt D-meson $R_{\rm AA}$ and $v_{\rm 2}$ measurements in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV, performed with the ALICE detector will be presented.
