Search

Heavy quarks (i.e. charm and beauty) in heavy-ion collisions are initially produced out of kinetic equilibrium via hard partonic scattering processes. However, recent measurements of anisotropic flow of charmed hadrons pose the question regarding the thermalization of heavy quarks in the quarkgluon plasma (QGP). Exploiting a mapping between transport theory and fluid dynamics, we develop a fluid-dynamic description for charm quarks and show results for charm-hadron momentum distributions. Inspired by recent Lattice-QCD (LQCD) calculations, we show that a late hydrodynamization within the lifetime of the QGP is possible also for beauty quarks.

Heavy-flavour hadrons, i.e. hadrons containing charm or beauty quarks, are effective probes to test perturbative-QCD (pQCD) calculations, to investigate the different hadronisation mechanisms, and to study the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. Measurements performed in pp and p–Pb collisions have recently revealed unexpected features not in line with the expectations based on previous measurements from e+e− and ep collisions, showing that charm fragmentation fractions are not universal. The investigation of initial-state effects such as shadowing in the collision of a proton with a heavy nucleus is also performed. Measurements of open heavy-flavour and quarkonia production in Pb–Pb collisions allow for testing the mechanisms of heavy-quark transport, energy loss, and coalescence effects during the hadronisation in the presence of a QCD medium. In this contribution, the most recent results on open heavy-flavour and quarkonia production in pp, p–Pb, and Pb–Pb collisions obtained by the ALICE Collaboration are discussed.

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR will investigate the QCD phase diagram in the region of high net-baryon densities. Enhanced production of strange baryons, such as the most abundantly produced Λ hyperons, can signal transition to a new phase of the QCD matter. In this work, the CBM performance for reconstruction of the Λ hyperon via its decay to proton and π− is presented. Decay topology reconstruction is implemented in the Particle-Finder Simple (PFSimple) package with Machine Learning algorithms providing effcient selection of the decays and high signal to background ratio.