Measurement of electrons from semileptonic heavy-flavour hadron decays at midrapidity in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV

TL;DR

This paper measures electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, analyzing their yields and nuclear modification factors to study in-medium energy loss and nuclear effects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed measurement of heavy-flavour electron yields and nuclear modification factors at 5.02 TeV, offering insights into parton energy loss and nuclear PDF modifications.

Findings

Electrons from heavy-flavour decays are suppressed at intermediate $p_T$ in Pb-Pb collisions.

The suppression increases with collision centrality.

The proton-proton cross section aligns with perturbative QCD predictions.

Abstract

The differential invariant yield as a function of transverse momentum ($p_\mathrm{T}$) of electrons from semileptonic heavy-flavour hadron decays was measured at midrapidity in central (0-10%), semi-central (30-50%) and peripheral (60-80%) lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02\text{ TeV}$ in the $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ intervals 0.5-26 GeV/$c$ (0-10% and 30-50%) and 0.5-10 GeV/$c$ (60-80%). The production cross section in proton-proton (pp) collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV was measured as well in $0.5<p_\mathrm{T}<10$ GeV/$c$ and it lies close to the upper band of perturbative QCD calculation uncertainties up to $p_\mathrm{T}=5$ GeV/$c$ and close to the mean value for larger $p_\mathrm{T}$. The modification of the electron yield with respect to what is expected for an incoherent superposition of nucleon-nucleon collisions is evaluated by measuring the nuclear modification factor $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$. The measurement of the $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$ in different centrality classes allows in-medium energy loss of charm and beauty quarks to be investigated. The $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$ shows a suppression with respect to unity at intermediate $p_\mathrm{T}$, which increases while moving towards more central collisions. Moreover, the measured $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$ is sensitive to the modification of the parton distribution functions (PDF) in nuclei, like nuclear shadowing, which causes a suppression of the heavy-quark production at low $p_\mathrm{T}$ in heavy-ion collisions at LHC.