Heavy-flavour production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and at the LHC

Diego Stocco (1)

1 SUBATECH - Laboratoire de physique subatomique et des technologies associées

Heavy flavour measurements have a key role in the investigation of the properties of the hot and dense state of strongly interacting matter which is produced in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. Heavy quarks are produced in the hard scattering processes occurring at the initial stages of the collision, and act as self-generated probes experiencing the full evolution of the medium. The measurement of open charm and beauty allows one to probe the mechanisms of heavy-quark propagation, energy loss and hadronisation in the medium. A systematic study of heavy flavour production in nucleus-nucleus collisions was first carried out at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and then continued both at RHIC and at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, with a significative increase in the centre of mass energy. The nuclear modification factor and azimuthal anisotropy of heavy flavours in several decay channels have been measured in a wide kinematic range. A selection of the results will be presented in these proceedings and the implication for the properties of the medium will be discussed.

Domaines: Physique des Hautes Energies - Expérience [hep-ex]; Physique Nucléaire Expérimentale [nucl-ex]

Diego Stocco. Heavy-flavour production in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and at the LHC. The European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics, Jul 2015, Vienna, Austria. pp.222, ⟨10.22323/1.234.0222⟩. ⟨hal-02110014⟩