Early physics with ALICE

The ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider started its p-p data taking at the end of 2009. The availability of the first low luminosity collisions at √s = 900 GeV and √s = 2.36TeV allowed to improve and extend the calibration and alignment procedures, started with cosmic rays in 2008. Together with the final commissioning of the detector with real data, the collected data sample of p-p collisions is presently being used to carry out the early physics studies, aimed at assessing the global characteristics of the interaction. In particular, results on the pseudorapidity density of primary charged particle in the central region are discussed here. They were obtained using the two innermost Silicon Pixel layers of the Inner Tracking System, which provided both the primary vertex position and the charged multiplicity, by matching the reconstructed points on the two layers

Heavy flavours in heavy-ion collisions: quenching, flow and correlations

We present results for the quenching, elliptic flow and azimuthal correlations of heavy flavour particles in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions obtained through the POWLANG transport setup, developed in the past to study the propagation of heavy quarks in the Quark-Gluon Plasma and here extended to include a modeling of their hadronization in the presence of a medium. Hadronization is described as occurring via the fragmentation of strings with endpoints given by the heavy (anti-)quark Q(Qbar) and a thermal parton qbar(q) from the medium. The flow of the light quarks is shown to affect significantly the R_AA and v_2 of the final D mesons, leading to a better agreement with the experimental data. The approach allows also predictions for the angular correlation between heavy-flavour hadrons (or their decay electrons) and the charged particles produced in the fragmentation of the heavy-quark strings

Vertex reconstruction for proton-proton collisions in ALICE

Reconstructing the interaction vertex is a challenging task in the low multiplicity environment of pp collisions at the LHC. The two innermost layers of the Inner Tracking System (ITS), made of pixels, allow to obtain a first estimate of the vertex position, which can be provided also in a quasi-online mode, since only the local reconstruction is used. The optimal vertex measurement is obtained after the full event processing, using the tracks reconstructed in the ALICE barrel detectors. We present the methods for primary vertex reconstruction in pp collisions using pixels and tracks reconstructed in the ITS+TPC or in the TPC only. We also show the performance of the vertex finder in reconstructing displaced vertices originated by short-lived particles like charmed mesons

Heavy flavours in AA collisions: production, transport and final spectra

A multi-step setup for heavy-flavour studies in high-energy nucleus-nucleus (AA) collisions --- addressing within a comprehensive framework the initial Q-Qbar production, the propagation in the hot medium until decoupling and the final hadronization and decays --- is presented. The initial hard production of Q-Qbar pairs is simulated using the POWHEG pQCD event generator, interfaced with the PYTHIA parton shower. Outcomes of the calculations are compared to experimental data in pp collisions and are used as a validated benchmark for the study of medium effects. In the AA case, the propagation of the heavy quarks in the medium is described in a framework provided by the relativistic Langevin equation. For the latter, different choices of transport coefficients are explored (either provided by a perturbative calculation or extracted from lattice-QCD simulations) and the corresponding numerical results are compared to experimental data from RHIC and the LHC. In particular, outcomes for the nuclear modification factor R_AA and for the elliptic flow v_2 of D/B mesons, heavy-flavour electrons and non-prompt J/\psi's are displayed.Comment: 16 pages, 21 figure

Langevin dynamics of heavy flavors in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

We study the stochastic dynamics of c and b quarks, produced in hard initial processes, in the hot medium created after the collision of two relativistic heavy ions. This is done through the numerical solution of the relativistic Langevin equation. The latter requires the knowledge of the friction and diffusion coefficients, whose microscopic evaluation is performed treating separately the contribution of soft and hard collisions. The evolution of the background medium is described by ideal/viscous hydrodynamics. Below the critical temperature the heavy quarks are converted into hadrons, whose semileptonic decays provide single-electron spectra to be compared with the current experimental data measured at RHIC. We focus on the nuclear modification factor R_AA and on the elliptic-flow coefficient v_2, getting, for sufficiently large p_T, a reasonable agreement.Comment: Talk given at the workshop "Jets in Proton-Proton and Heavy-Ion Collisions", Prague, 12th-14th August 201