Open heavy-flavour and electroweak boson measurements via the (di-)muonic decay channel with ALICE at the LHC

Workshop for young scientists on the physics of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions 2016

Senosi, Kgotlaesele Johnson^1

University of Cape Town and IThemba Laboratory of Accelerator Based Sciences, South Africa^1

关键词: Binary collisions;    Electroweak bosons;    Initial-state effects;    Muon spectrometer;    Nuclear parton distribution functions;    Perturbative quantum chromodynamics;    Proton-nucleus collisions;    Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/832/1/012033/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/832/1/012033

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Heavy flavours (charm and beauty) and electroweak bosons (W and Z) are produced in initial hard partonic scatterings. The former interact strongly with the medium formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions throughout its evolution, thus making them well suited to investigate its properties. Furthermore, heavy-flavour measurements in proton-nucleus collisions can be used to investigate initial-state effects whereas in proton-proton (pp) collisions they are considered an important test for perturbative Quantum ChromoDynamics (pQCD) predictions. In addition, open heavy-flavour measurements in pp collisions are used as a reference for proton-lead (p-Pb) and lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions. On the other hand, electroweak bosons and their leptonic decay products only interact weakly with the QCD matter and thus are suitable probes to test the validity of binary-collision scaling of hard processes. Moreover, their measurements in p-Pb collisions could help to constrain nuclear parton distribution functions. The ALICE muon spectrometer allows the measurement of open heavy flavour, W- and Z-boson production at forward rapidity (-4.0