No Arabic abstract
Heavy quarks, i.e. charm and beauty, are produced on a shorter time scale with respect to the strongly-interacting matter produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Therefore, they are unique probes to study the mechanisms of parton energy loss, hadronisation and thermalization in the hot and dense state of matter. The nuclear modification factor ($R_{rm AA}$) and the elliptic flow ($v_{2}$) are two of the main experimental observables that allow us to investigate the interaction strength of heavy quarks with the medium. The most recent results on heavy-flavour production and elliptic flow measured by the ALICE collaboration in Pb--Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_mathrm{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV will be discussed.
The ALICE collaboration at the LHC has measured the transverse momentum spectra of neutral pions via their two photon decay in pp and Pb$-$Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV over a broad transverse momentum range with different subsystems: with the electromagnetic calorimeters PHOS and EMCAL and with photon
The study of formation of heavy quarkonia in relativistic heavy ion collisions provides important insight into the properties of the produced high density QCD medium. Lattice QCD studies show sequential suppression of quarkonia states with increasing temperature; which affirms that a full spectroscopy, can provide us a thermometer for the matter produced under extreme conditions in relativistic heavy ion collisions and one of the most direct probes of de-confinement. Muons from the decay of charmonium resonances are detected in ALICE Experiment in p+p and Pb+Pb collisions with a muon spectrometer, covering the forward rapidity region($2.5<y<4$). The analysis of the inclusive J/$psi$ production in the first Pb+Pb data collected in the fall 2010 at a center of mass energy of $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}=2.76$ TeV is discussed. Preliminary results on the nuclear modification factor ($R_{AA}$) and the central to peripheral nuclear modification factor ($R_{CP}$) are presented.
Separation of charges along the extreme magnetic field created in non-central relativistic heavy--ion collisions is predicted to be a signature of local parity violation in strong interactions. We report on results for charge dependent two particle azimuthal correlations with respect to the reaction plane for Pb--Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV recorded in 2010 with ALICE at the LHC. The results are compared with measurements at RHIC energies and against currently available model predictions for LHC. Systematic studies of possible background effects including comparison with conventional (parity-even) correlations simulated with Monte Carlo event generators of heavy--ion collisions are also presented.
The ALICE experiment studies nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC in order to investigate the properties of QCD matter at extreme energy densities. The measurement of open charm and open beauty production allows one to probe the mechanisms of heavy-quark propagation, energy loss and hadronization in the hot and dense medium formed in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. In particular, in-medium energy loss is predicted to be different for massless partons (light quarks and gluons) and heavy quarks at moderate momentum. The ALICE apparatus allows us to measure open heavy-flavour particles in several decay channels and with a wide phase-space coverage. We present the results on the nuclear modification factors for heavy-flavour particle production in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrtsNN=2.76 TeV. Using proton-proton and lead-lead collision samples at sqrts=2.76 and 7 TeV and at sqrtsNN=2.76 TeV, respectively, nuclear modification factors R_AA(pT) were measured for D mesons at central rapidity (via displaced decay vertex reconstruction), and for electrons and muons from heavy-flavour decays, at central and forward rapidity, respectively. A large suppression is observed, by a factor 2.5-4 in central Pb--Pb collisions with respect to the pp reference, in the high-pT region, indicating a strong in-medium energy loss of heavy quarks.
A simple approach based on the separation of wounded nucleons in an A-A collision in two categories, those suffering single collisions - corona and the rest - core, estimated within a Glauber Monte-Carlo approach, explains the centrality dependence of the light flavor hadrons production in Pb-Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}$=2.76 TeV. The core contribution does not include any dependence of any process on the fireball shape as a function of the impact parameter. Therefore, the ratios of the $p_T$ distributions to the one corresponding to the minimum bias pp collisions at the same energy, each of them normalised to the corresponding charged particle density, the $langle p_Trangle$ and transverse energy per unit of rapidity are reproduced less accurate by such an approach. The results show that the corona contribution plays an important role also at LHC energies and it has to be considered in order to evidence the centrality dependence of different observables related to the core properties and dynamics.