Saturday 01 February 2025
Heavy-flavor production and hadronization at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are crucial for understanding the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter thought to have existed in the early universe. The LHC experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb have recently published new results on heavy-flavor production in various collision systems.
The LHC is capable of creating heavy flavors, such as charm and beauty quarks, by colliding protons at incredibly high energies. These collisions produce a multitude of particles, including mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) and baryons (three-quark clusters). The ratio of strange-to-non-strange charm fragmentation functions, for example, can reveal the hadronization mechanisms at play.
ALICE has measured the production of D-mesons in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. They found that the strange-to-non-strange production yield ratio exhibits an increasing trend as a function of transverse momentum (pT) up to around 8 GeV/c, while non-prompt measurements show no significant trend due to larger uncertainties.
ATLAS has measured two-muon correlation functions in proton-proton collisions and lead-lead collisions at the same center-of-mass energy. They found that the peak widths of these correlations are similar between the two collision systems, indicating a dominance of beauty decays in this kinematic region.
ALICE has also measured the production of J/ψ mesons in lead-lead collisions at 5.02 TeV. The ratio of J/ψ to D0 meson production is particularly sensitive to hadronization mechanisms and can provide constraints on models. They found that this ratio is higher in most central collision intervals, a feature consistent with statistical hadronization.
These results are crucial for testing pQCD (perturbative quantum chromodynamics) calculations and the factorization approach, which describe heavy-flavor production as a two-step process: first, partons (quarks or gluons) are produced through hard scattering, and then these partons fragment into hadrons. The measurements suggest that charm hadrons can be produced through coalescence or statistical recombination at low and moderate pT in lead-lead collisions.
The LHC experiments have made significant progress in understanding heavy-flavor production and hadronization.
Cite this article: “Heavy Flavor Physics at the Large Hadron Collider”, The Science Archive, 2025.
Large Hadron Collider, Heavy Flavors, Quark-Gluon Plasma, Alice, Atlas, Cms, Lhcb, Charm Quarks, Beauty Quarks, Hadronization, Pqcd
