Charm and beauty quarks are recognised as excellent probes of the colour-deconfined medium produced in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Due to their large masses, these quarks are created only in hard scattering processes, in short time scales compared to the formation of the QGP. Therefore, they experience the full evolution of the system, interacting with the medium constituents via elastic scatterings and radiative processes. Measurements of the production and azimuthal anisotropies of hadrons containing heavy quarks allow us to study the properties of partonic energy loss in the medium at high transverse momentum (pT), the participation of heavy quarks in the system collective motions, and their possible thermalisation at low pT. The measurement of the relative abundances of different heavy-flavour hadron species, especially of baryons and hadrons with strange-quark content, provides insights in the heavy-quark hadronisation mechanisms.
In this seminar, the latest results in the heavy-flavour sector in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions by the ALICE experiment will be presented. In addition, the prospects for improved measurements with the proposed upgrades of the ALICE detector will be also discussed.
DFA Prof.ssa Silvia Lenzi
