Study of collective phenomena via the production of heavy quarks and quarkonia in hadronic collisions

TL;DR

This paper reviews how heavy quarks and quarkonia serve as probes for the quark-gluon plasma in various collision systems, highlighting recent experimental results from the ALICE collaboration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental findings on heavy-flavor and quarkonium flow in different collision systems, emphasizing collective phenomena and medium properties.

Findings

Observation of elliptic flow indicating charm-quark thermalization

Detection of collective-like effects in small collision systems

Insights into heavy-quark energy loss and quarkonium dissociation

Abstract

Open heavy flavor and quarkonia have long been identified as ideal probes for understanding the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Heavy quarks are produced in the early stage of the heavy-ion collisions. Therefore they experience the evolution of the medium produced, providing an important tool to investigate the properties of the QGP. In particular, the magnitude of the elliptic flow measured at the LHC is interpreted as a signature of the charm-quark thermalization in the QGP. This is reflected in the azimuthal anisotropies of the final particles. In addition, the observation of collective-like effects in high-multiplicity pp and p--Pb collisions provides new insights on the evolution of QGP-related observables going from large to small collision systems. A better understanding of heavy-quark energy loss, quarkonium dissociation, and production mechanism can therefore be obtained with those system-size dependent observables. We present recent results of the $\mathrm{J}/\psi $ and open heavy-flavor hadrons flow in pp, p--Pb, and Pb--Pb collisions carried out by the ALICE collaboration.