Open heavy-flavour production in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions

Abstract

Heavy quarks (charm and bottom) provide sensitive penetrating probes of hot quark matter produced in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. Due to their large mass, heavy quarks are believed to be predominantly produced in the initial state of the collision by gluon fusion processes. The study of heavy-flavour production in nucleus-nucleus collisions provides key tests of parton energy-loss models and, thus, yields profound insight into the properties of the produced matter.

In this contribution, recent results on heavy-flavour production from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and first measurements from the ALICE experiment at the CERN-Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented. The LHC will provide QCD matter at even higher temperatures and energy densities. We focus on RHIC measurements of single electrons and jet-like heavy-flavour particle correlations. First D meson signals from 7 TeV proton-proton collisions from the ALICE experiment are discussed. Next-to-leading-order QCD processes, such as gluon splitting, become important at LHC energies and its contribution can be accesses by the measurement of the charm content in jets.