Charm production and in-medium QCD energy loss in nucleus-nucleus collisions with ALICE. A performance study

Abstract

This work is aimed at studying the performance of the ALICE detector for measuring charm production in heavy ion collisions at the LHC and for investigating the properties of the deconfined quark-gluon medium formed in central nucleus-nucleus reactions by a comparison of its `opacities' to massive (charm) quarks and massless partons. The topics discussed in the thesis can be summarized as follows. Definition of a baseline for heavy quarks production cross sections and kinematical distributions at LHC energies, using (and comparing) pQCD tools (HVQMNR program) and the PYTHIA event generator. Study of the experimental issues related to the identification of the displaced decay vertices of charm mesons: track impact parameter resolution and primary vertex reconstruction. Definition of a strategy for the exclusive reconstruction of D^0 \to Kπdecays with ALICE in Pb-Pb and pp collisions and evaluation of the performance in terms of momentum range, precision and accuracy of the measurement. Study and simulation of the predicted parton energy loss effect, including a realistic description of the collision geometry and an algorithm to take into account the expected lower loss for heavy quarks (dead cone effect). Assessment of a strategy to carry out comparative measurements of the quenching of charm quarks and massless partons and evaluation of the attainable sensitivity.

arXiv commentPh.D. thesis, 259 pages, 140 figures, corrected typos, updated references

References in corpus (13)

• High-Energy-Physics Event Generation with PYTHIA 6.1
• Evidence from d+Au measurements for final-state suppression of high $p_T$ hadrons in Au+Au collisions at RHIC
• Fragmentation Functions for Pions, Kaons, and Protons at Next-to-Leading Order
• Absence of Suppression in Particle Production at Large Transverse Momentum in sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV d+Au Collisions
• Calculating Quenching Weights
• Azimuthal anisotropy and correlations in the hard scattering regime at RHIC
• Measurement of single electrons and implications for charm production in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)= 130 GeV
• Sudakov Resummation and Finite Order Expansions of Heavy Quark Hadroproduction Cross Sections
• The A Dependence of Open Charm and Bottom Production
• Hard probes in heavy ion collisions at the LHC: heavy flavour physics
• High $p_T$ Measurements from PHENIX
• Nuclear parton distributions in the DGLAP approach
• Fermion Scattering in domain walls with a locally dependent phase

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Fragility of High-pT Hadron Spectra as a Hard Probe
• Measurement of electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV
• Measurement of electrons from beauty-hadron decays in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV
• Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC
• Heavy flavour production in ALICE
• Jet physics in ALICE
• Measuring beauty production in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC via single electrons in ALICE
• Open Charm Mesons at the LHC with ALICE
• Probing the QGP with charm at ALICE-LHC
• Open heavy flavour production in ALICE
• Charm production and energy loss at the LHC with ALICE
• Heavy Flavours in Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC: ALICE Performance
• Quality assurance for the ALICE Monte Carlo procedure