Heavy­flavour measurements in Pb­Pb collisions with ALICE at the LHC

Abstract

The ALICE experiment studies the properties of the strongly-interacting matter created in high energy heavy-ion collisions, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Heavy quarks are a powerful probe for investigating such a state of matter, since they are predominantly produced in the first hard scattering processes and they bring to the final state information on the deconfined phase. Heavy-flavour particles are reconstructed via hadronic and semi-leptonic decays in the ALICE detector. The measurements of the modification of the heavyflavour hadrons transverse momentum distribution in Pb–Pb collisions with respect to pp and of their azimuthal anisotropy show that heavy quarks have a sizeable interaction with the medium constituents.