Measurement of D s + production and nuclear modification factor in Pb-Pb collisions at s N N = 2.76 $$ \sqrt{{\mathrm{s}}_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76 $$ TeV

Abstract

The production of prompt D + s mesons was measured for the first time in collisions of heavy nuclei with the ALICE detector at the LHC. The analysis was performed on a data sample of Pb-Pb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair, √ s NN , of 2.76 TeV in two different centrality classes, namely 0-10% and 20-50%. D + s mesons and their antiparticles were reconstructed at mid-rapidity from their hadronic decay channel D + s → φπ + , with φ → K − K + , in the transverse momentum intervals 4 < p T < 12 GeV/c and 6 < p T < 12 GeV/c for the 0-10% and 20-50% centrality classes, respectively. The nuclear modification factor R AA was computed by comparing the p T -differential production yields in Pb-Pb collisions to those in proton-proton (pp) collisions at the same energy. This pp reference was obtained using the cross section measured at

Open charm correlators and spectral functions at high temperature

“…Above the crossover, we find no evidence of any surviving bound states. The thermal modifications are smaller for D s and D * s mesons than for D and D * mesons, which may point to an enhanced yield of D s relative to D mesons in heavy ion collisions, in line with theoretical predictions and emerging experimental evidence [4].…”

“…Until recently, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on quarkonia, ie the cc and bb systems. This has changed in the past few years, with an increased experimental and theoretical interest in open charm, including D meson flow [1] and yields [2,3,4].…”

Extraction of heavy-flavor transport coefficients in QCD matter

“…The experimental handle on the recombination mechanisms of heavy quarks is likely to be augmented by the measurement of heavy-strange mesons [71,72], i.e., D s = (cs) and B s = (bs) (or even more elusive multi-HQ hadrons, e.g., B c [73] or Ξ ++ [74]). The main idea is [60,75,76] that the well-established enhancement of strange quarks in URHICs, relative to pp collisions, will increase the yields and quantitatively affect the p T spectra and elliptic flow of the charm-strange mesons in the presence of recombination of charm quarks within a heat bath of strange quarks.…”

Development of heavy-flavour flow-harmonics in high-energy nuclear collisions

“…Clearly, recombination with light partons from the medium, besides the kinematic distributions, can also affect the heavy-flavour hadrochemistry in nucleus-nucleus collisions, changing the relative yields of the various species with respect to the proton-proton case. This was modeled for instance in [20] and first experimental results are getting available [21][22][23], however we will not touch such an issue.…”