Heavy Flavour Electron Elliptic Flow

Abstract

Due to the large mass of the Charm and Beauty quarks, they are c reated in the very first moments of the ultra-high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions taking place at the CERN LHC, therefore, they should be unaware of the geome try of the colli- sion system and carry no azimuthal anisotropies. Similarly , the energy loss via gluon radiation for these massive quarks should be suppressed, th e so-called dead cone ef- fect. Although the observation of elliptic flow in the electro ns produced through the semileptonic decay of these heavy mesons is an indirect meas urement, throughout this thesis it will be shown that a strong correlation exists between the momentum anisotropy of the mother and daughter particles. In the low t ransverse momentum region such measurement would establish whether or not the s ystem reaches local thermal equilibrium. While at large transverse momentum, t he observation of collec- tivity for the heavy flavours can be understood only if the col lisional and radiative in-medium interactions are strong enough. Therefore, this measurement will cast light on the energy loss mechanism and heavy-quark scatteri ng cross section. The aim of this thesis is to discuss the challenges such measurem ent presents and to an- alyze the results obtained by analyzing the data taken by ALIC E in the winter of 2010. Remarkably, a large electron elliptic flow was observe d, both for the integral and differential cases. It will be shown that for intermediat e transverse momentum, this measurement suggests a large elliptic flow for the heavy flavour mesons