Nuclear Physics Seminar

In A+A collisions, heavy-flavor (charm and bottom) quarks are created at the initial stage of the collision and experience the entire QGP evolution. Therefore, they serve as penetrating probes that traverse the hot and dense medium, interact with the partonic constituents of the plasma and lose energy. Studies of production rate and azimuthal anisotropy of heavy-flavor hadrons provide insight into the energy loss mechanism and transport properties of heavy quarks in the QGP. To better understand the baseline of heavy quark—QGP interaction and the origin of the azimuthal anisotropy, it's crucial to extend the heavy-flavor measurements to smaller systems like p+Pb and pp collisions. In this seminar, selected results on the production and azimuthal anisotropy of the muons from charm and bottom hadron decays in pp, p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions with the ATLAS experiments at the LHC will be shown. The implications for our understanding of the QGP properties by comparing the results with model calculations will be discussed.