Measurement of azimuthal anisotropy of muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at sNN=5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Summary, in English

Azimuthal anisotropies of muons from charm and bottom hadron decays are measured in Pb+Pb collisions at sNN=5.02TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015 and 2018 with integrated luminosities of 0.5nb−1 and 1.4nb−1, respectively. The kinematic selection for heavy-flavor muons requires transverse momentum 4<pT<30GeV and pseudorapidity |η|<2.0. The dominant sources of muons in this pT range are semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons. These heavy-flavor muons are separated from light-hadron decay muons and punch-through hadrons using the momentum imbalance between the measurements in the tracking detector and in the muon spectrometers. Azimuthal anisotropies, quantified by flow coefficients, are measured via the event-plane method for inclusive heavy-flavor muons as a function of the muon pT and in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. Heavy-flavor muons are separated into contributions from charm and bottom hadron decays using the muon transverse impact parameter with respect to the event primary vertex. Non-zero elliptic (v2) and triangular (v3) flow coefficients are extracted for charm and bottom muons, with the charm muon coefficients larger than those for bottom muons for all Pb+Pb collision centralities. The results indicate substantial modification to the charm and bottom quark angular distributions through interactions in the quark-gluon plasma produced in these Pb+Pb collisions, with smaller modifications for the bottom quarks as expected theoretically due to their larger mass. © 2020 The Author(s)

• Author: G Aad; Torsten Åkesson; Simona Bocchetta; Lene Bryngemark; Eric Edward Corrigan; Caterina Doglioni; Jannik Geisen; Kristian Gregersen; Eva Brottmann Hansen; Vincent Hedberg; Göran Jarlskog; Edgar Kellermann; Balazs Konya; Else Lytken; Katja Mankinen; Caterina Marcon; Ulf Mjörnmark; Geoffrey André Adrien Mullier; Ruth Pöttgen; Trine Poulsen; Eleni Skorda; Oxana Smirnova; L Zwalinski
• Department/s: Particle and nuclear physics; eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
• Publishing year: 2020
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
• Volume: 807
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135595
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Topic: Subatomic Physics
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0370-2693