Speaker
Description
Strongly interacting matter at high temperatures and large densities can be created and carefully studied under laboratory conditions in high-energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei. Especially, heavy quarks (charm and beauty) provide particular good probes to study the QCD plasma and its evolution since they are predominantly produced in initial hard partonic scattering processes in the early stages of the collision.
Both the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL provide heavy-ion collisions at unprecedented energy densities. The measurement of open heavy-flavour production in such collisions allows the study of the dynamical properties of the plasma phase through the energy loss of heavy quarks.
In this contribution, an overview will be given of current open heavy-flavour measurements from RHIC and the LHC as well as future directions and new observables.