ALICE perspectives for the study of charm and beauty energy loss at the LHC.pdf

a r X i v : n u c l - e x / 0 6 0 8 0 0 5 v 1 2 A u g 2 0 0 6 EPJ manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) ALICE perspectives for the study of charm and beauty energy loss at the LHC A. Dainese for the ALICE Collaboration INFN – LNL, Legnaro (Padova), Italy Received: February 8, 2008 Abstract. At LHC energy, heavy quarks will be abundantly produced and the design of the ALICE detector will allow us to study their production using several channels. The expected heavy-quark in-medium energy loss in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC is calculated within a model, that is compared to the available heavy-quark quenching measurements at RHIC. The nuclear modification factors and heavy-to-light ratios of charm and beauty mesons are considered. The capability of the ALICE experiment for addressing this phenomenology is discussed. PACS. 2 5.75.-q, 14.65.Dw, 13.25.Ft 1 Introduction The ALICE experiment [1,2] will study Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC, with a centre-of-mass energy √ sNN = 5.5 TeV, in order to investigate the properties of QCD matter at energy densities of up to several hundred times the den- sity of atomic nuclei. Under these conditions a deconfined state of quarks and gluons is expected to be formed. The measurement of open charm and open beauty pro- duction allows to investigate the mechanisms of heavy- quark production and propagation in the hot and dense medium formed in the collision. In particular, medium- induced partonic energy loss of heavy quarks has recently become one of the most exciting and disputed issues within high-energy heavy-ion physics, after the observation at RHIC of a large suppression in the production of high- transverse-momentum electrons from heavy-flavour decays. In Section 2 we describe these experimental results and we compare them to a model implementation of a particular energy loss calculation. Within this model we then obtain predictions for relevant charm and beauty energy loss ob- servables at LHC energy. After p