Dielectron production in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV with ALICE

Abstract

The ALICE Collaboration measured dielectron production as a function of the invariant mass ($m_{\mathrm{ee}}$), the pair transverse momentum ($p_{\mathrm{T},\mathrm{ee}}$) and the pair distance of closest approach ($\mathrm{DC}{\mathrm{A}}_{\mathrm{ee}}$) in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV. Prompt and non-prompt dielectron sources can be separated with the $\mathrm{DC}{\mathrm{A}}_{\mathrm{ee}}$, which will give the opportunity in heavy-ion collisions to identify thermal radiation from the medium in the intermediate-mass range dominated by contributions from open-charm and beauty hadron decays. The charm and beauty total cross sections are extracted from the data by fitting the spectra with two different MC generators, i.e. PYTHIA a leading order event generator and POWHEG a next-to-leading order event generator. Significant model dependences are observed, reflecting the sensitivity of this measurement to the heavy-flavour production mechanisms.

References in corpus (2)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Measurement of D-meson production at mid-rapidity in pp collisions at $\sqrt{\mathbf{s}}=7$ TeV