Open Charm Mesons at the LHC with ALICE

TL;DR

This paper discusses the capabilities of the ALICE experiment at the LHC to detect open charm mesons, which are crucial for studying the quark-gluon plasma and heavy flavor production in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It presents the potential of ALICE for heavy flavor physics, including D-meson reconstruction studies using Monte Carlo simulations, highlighting new experimental prospects at the LHC.

Findings

ALICE can effectively detect open charm mesons in proton-proton and heavy ion collisions.

Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate successful D-meson reconstruction via hadronic decay channels.

Heavy flavor measurements will help normalize charmonia and bottomonia yields at LHC.

Abstract

The ALICE experiment will be able to detect hadrons containing charm and beauty quarks in proton-proton and heavy ion collisions in the new energy regime of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Open charmed mesons are a powerful tool to study the medium produced in heavy ion collisions, since charm quarks are produced on a very short time scale and they experience the whole history of the collision. In addition, the measurements of heavy flavour yield provide a natural normalization for those of charmonia and bottomonia production at LHC. In this talk, after a general overview of ALICE perspectives for heavy flavour physics, we will report some study of D-meson reconstruction through their hadronic decay channels with Monte Carlo simulated data.