Speaker
Dr
Zinhle Buthelezi
(iThemba LABS)
Description
A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is one of the 4 large experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The primary purpose of ALICE is to study and characterize the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) formed in high-energy nuclear collisions. The capabilities of ALICE include excellent particle identification, wide rapidity coverage, precise vertexing and tracking in a high multiplicity environment, making it possible to study heavy flavour (charm and beauty) production. Heavy flavours are produced at the early stage of the collision in hard partonic scattering. In proton-proton collisions they are used as bench-mark for perturbative QCD calculations while in heavy ion collisions they are used as probes of the transport properties of strongly-interacting matter at high energy density. In ALICE heavy flavours are studied at mid-rapidity via the hadronic and semi-electronic decay channels as well as at forward rapidity using the muon spectrometer. The ALICE collaboration has published results obtained from heavy flavour measurements in p-p at √s = 2.76 and 7 TeV and Pb-Pb collisions at √s(NN) = 2.76, respectively. In this presentation we will report on some of these results. In particular, we will discuss the observations of high-momentum suppression of azimuthal anisotropy of heavy-flavour hadrons.
Primary author
Dr
Zinhle Buthelezi
(iThemba LABS)
