Speaker
Description
Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are regarded as ideal probes of the hot and dense deconfined QCD medium, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. They are produced in hard scattering processes in the early stages of a heavy-ion collision.
In addition, their characteristic flavour is conserved throughout the evolution of the medium formed in these collisions. Therefore, heavy-quark measurements can give insight into the mechanisms of in-medium energy loss, propagation and hadronisation. The ALICE experiment is designed to study the QGP produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. The detector, composed of central barrel (|η|<0.9) detectors as well as the muon spectrometer at forward rapidity (-4<η<-2.5), is well suited to study heavy-quark production,exploiting various experimental techniques. This talk will review recent results obtained in heavy-quark measurements by the ALICE Collaboration in heavy-ion collisions at LHC energies.
