Recent results on heavy flavours and quarkonia from ALICE

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent ALICE measurements of heavy-flavour hadrons in various collision systems, highlighting new findings on heavy quark fragmentation and their implications for understanding quark-gluon plasma and QCD processes.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent experimental results on heavy-flavour production in small systems and compares them with theoretical calculations, revealing non-universal fragmentation fractions.

Findings

Unforeseen features in heavy-flavour production in small systems

Fragmentation fractions of heavy quarks are not universal

Comparison with calculations shows discrepancies

Abstract

Heavy-flavour hadrons, containing at least one charm or beauty quark, are excellent probes of the deconfined medium created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, known as quark-gluon plasma. Results in smaller collision systems, such as proton-proton and p-Pb collisions, besides representing an important baseline for interpreting heavy-ion measurements, are crucial to test perturbative QCD calculations and hadronisation mechanisms in the absence of hot medium effects, as well as to search for commonalities with heavy-ion systems. Recently, measurements in proton-proton and p-Pb collisions have revealed unforeseen features with respect to the expectations based on previous results from ${\rm e}^{+}{\rm e}^{-}$ and ep collisions, showing that fragmentation fractions of heavy quarks are not universal. In this contribution, an overview of the most recent ALICE heavy-flavour measurements, along with the comparison to available calculations, will be discussed.