This report reviews the study of open heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in high-energy hadronic collisions, as tools to investigate fundamental aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics, from the proton and nucleus structure at high energy to deconfinement and the properties of the Quark–Gluon Plasma. Emphasis is given to the lessons learnt from LHC Run 1 results, which are reviewed in a global picture with the results from SPS and RHIC at lower energies, as well as to the questions to be addressed in the future. The report covers heavy flavour and quarkonium production in proton–proton, proton–nucleus and nucleus–nucleus collisions. This includes discussion of the effects of hot and cold strongly interacting matter, quarkonium photoproduction in nucleus–nucleus collisions and perspectives on the study of heavy flavour and quarkonium with upgrades of existing experiments and new experiments. The report results from the activity of the SaporeGravis network of the I3 Hadron Physics programme of the European Union 7 Framework Programme.

High transverse momentum (pT) single nonphotonic electrons which have been measured in the RHIC experiments come dominantly from heavy meson decay. The ratio of their pT spectra in pp and AA collisions [RAA(pT)] reveals the energy loss of heavy quarks in the environment created by AA collisions. Using a fixed coupling constant and the Debye mass (mD[approximate]gT) as the infrared regulator, perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations are not able to reproduce the data, neither the energy loss nor the azimuthal (v2) distribution. Employing a running coupling constant and replacing the Debye mass by a more realistic hard thermal loop (HTL) calculation, we find a substantial increase in the collisional energy loss, which brings the v2(pT) distribution as well as RAA(pT) to values close to the experimental ones without excluding a contribution from radiative energy loss