Heavy-flavour production in heavy-ion collisions at CERN-LHC

by Andre Mischke (Utrecht University)

Wednesday 10 Oct 2012, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

Seminar room 006, basement (MPA Garching)

High-energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei allow to form and carefully study a high-density, colour-deconfined state of strongly-interacting matter. According to calculations from lattice quantum-chromodynamics, under the conditions of high energy density and temperature reached in such collisions, the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is expected to occur, where the colour confinement of quarks and gluons into hadrons should vanish and chiral symmetry should be restored. Heavy-flavour particles, containing charm and beauty, are unique probes of the conditions of the medium formed in nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energy. Heavy quarks are believed to be dominantly produced by initial hard scatterings through gluon fusion processes and interact with the surrounding medium. They are expected to be sensitive to the energy density of the medium through the mechanism of in-medium partonic energy loss. The so-called "dead cone effect" is expected to reduce the radiative energy loss for heavy quarks compared to light quarks. In this Special Universe Talk Andre will present and discuss recent measurements on open and hidden heavy-flavour production in lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.