Speaker
Description
Open heavy-flavor hadrons, encompassing charm or bottom quarks, serve as crucial probes for examining the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at LHC. Owing to their large masses and early production in the collision timeline, heavy quarks traverse the medium and retain information about its evolution and transport properties.
The presentation includes measurements of differential cross sections and nuclear modification factors ($R_{AA}$) of D and B mesons and the $\Lambda_c$ baryon at roughly 5 TeV, alongside the first measurement of $\Lambda_c$-flow. These results offer a significant understanding of heavy quark interaction with the QGP medium. Furthermore, by employing event-shape engineering (ESE) to $D^0$ meson elliptic flow, we studied the influence of initial-state eccentricity on the charm-hadron $v_2$, constraining the degree to which heavy quarks participate in the collective expansion of the medium. These measurements provide direct insight into how initial-stage geometric fluctuations shape final-state heavy-flavor flow patterns and the understanding of the emergence of collectivity and the transport properties of charm quarks in the QGP. Analyzing the $R_{AA}$ and the baryon-to-meson ratio for charmed hadrons provides vital perspectives into charm-quark energy dissipation mechanisms and hadron formation processes in the QGP. These measurements offer crucial constraints to theoretical models in incorporating collisional and radiative energy loss and hadronization via fragmentation and coalescence.
